When sightings of Leonardo DiCaprio and Miley Cyrus (dressed as deranged vagabonds) at Art Basel in Miami cause a stir, one wonders what remains of the art world. Indeed it is tempting to think that the art world has been swallowed by the combined marketing and publicity machines of Hollywood and the fashion and music industries. Art is an […]
There are some questions in the art world that are not well received. Most of these have to do with money and rank. Asking how much an artwork costs or how important it is can seem a little crass and demeaning to the intensely personal experience of viewing high art. “The greatest picture in the […]
Art Basel Miami Beach is an ostentatious display of wealth and the wealthy. That this obvious fact is annually broached with dismay and shock by much of the art world is in no small part due to Art Basel itself, which, increasingly, insists on being similar in style to a biennial or large-scale exhibition, with […]
Anyone in need of a potent antidote to the feeding frenzy at Art Basel Miami Beach last week should head right now to Paula Cooper Gallery’s second-floor space at 521 West 21st Street in West Chelsea. On view there is a solo show by the German–born, New York–based artist Hans Haacke, whose six-decade career is […]
For weeks I’d been telling myself, and anyone who would listen, that I was going to skip the 2014 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. It had been a busy fall. October’s Frieze London fair is at least on my home turf, but then there were whirlwind trips to Paris, for FIAC, and New York, for […]
As we close out our coverage of Art Basel, a small recommendation for next year’s fairs: Get the hell out of Miami. It may look nice, but not even those with helicopters can avoid the traffic jams, there are never enough cabs and the food and hotel costs are astronomical. People, this is bullshit. Time for […]
“If no one ever looked at art, would anybody even create it? And how much does art actually need buyers.” Extremely reasonable questions put forth by the 2014 BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors, these queries appeared especially intriguing during the latest iteration of Art Basel in Miami Beach (ABMB). A positively gilded affair that […]
ON WEDNESDAY, a man with a plan was talking into a banana, walking down Lincoln Road. Two wives, fidgeting with rings and bracelets, prepared to step into a large inflatable concept—TRUTH—while the husbands stood a few paces back. At a bar made of sand, a woman wearing a pure white silicone alligator, clipped like a […]
With the mercury dropping in the art world power centers of old, it’s time for the annual migration to Miami for Art Basel Miami Beach, its ever-expanding roster of satellite fairs and pop-up exhibitions, and the impossible schedule of parties and performances all week long (December 1–7, 2014). Great week, but getting a bit crazy…?!
From the outset of his career, Puryear refused to give up what he knew and studied in order to align his work with the prevailing aesthetic. Some people believe they should do whatever it takes to fit in, while others accept that they will never fit in and do not try. There is the assimilationist […]
Quotes from Richard Serra: “Art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” “My sculptures are not objects for the viewer to stop and stare at. The historical purpose of placing sculpture on a pedestal was to establish a separation between the sculpture and the viewer. I am interested in creating a behavioral space […]
A brilliant painter derailed by an unfortunate obsession. There’s no escaping it; Hat Stand, 1969, is a beastly object. The blank-faced mannequin is too literal to succeed as a sculpture, and the conceit is too nasty to be ignored. Her position – holding up her hands to receive our hats – recalls the torture meted […]
Zoe Williams goes among the women as fetish furniture at the RA’s new show to find out. I find it very difficult to have an authentic response to work that has generated a lot of controversy in the past. My inner contrarian harasses me to disagree with the orthodoxy. So I was all set to […]
Irving Sandler is an artists’ art historian. In contrast to other prominent midcentury art critics—like the New York Times’s John Canaday, who warned him against fraternizing with artists for fear of impairing his critical distance—Sandler purposefully immersed himself in his subjects’ milieu, first in his days as a young reviewer for Artnews and later as […]
Seventy kilometers west of Doha lies the Brouq Nature Reserve, a sand spit in the Gulf of Bahrain where Qataris like to camp and wax nostalgic about their grandparents’ nomadic Bedouin lifestyle. To get there, you drive an hour along a highway bordered by electrical towers and plastic barriers that prevent blowing sand from drifting […]
This year’s Turner Prize shortlisted artists are hooked on materiality. Not some slick, seamless production-value fetishism geared for maximum visible impact, but almost the exact opposite—a thoughtful, often overly self-conscious, politically inflected take on materials and media, on production and reproduction, in which the frictionless transparency of images is jammed by the clunky inertia of […]
Robert Gober’s retrospective “The Heart Is Not A Metaphor,” which opens on October 4 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a strange and moving survey of domestic unease, seemingly pointless labor, and creeping horror, among other things. You enter the exhibition past a pair of very different works: “X Pipe Playpen,” […]
To say that Blenheim Palace is grand is an understatement: It’s epic. Entering the estate, with its stunning view of the open fields and humongous 18th-century mansion looming at the back, one feels like they have slipped into the opening credits of cult TV drama Downton Abbey. The Palace, built in 1704 by architect Sir […]
Has the Turner prize lost its power to shock? No – thanks to James Richards’s sphincter shots. But it’s Tris Vonna-Michell’s spellbinding spoken-word travelogues that deserve to win. What a heartening way to celebrate 30 years of the Turner prize. People are always saying the Turner, which shocked the nation with Tracey Emin’s unmade bed […]
Ever since critic and theorist Walter Benjamin penned his landmark essay in 1936, it’s been accepted as a kind of common wisdom that the aura of the artwork has withered in the (never-ending) age of mechanical reproduction. But a new study suggests the aura hasn’t vanished entirely yet, and perhaps it never will. “Are Artworks More Like […]