The furore around the work, complete with vodka bottles and pregnancy tests, helped to give lift-off to Emin’s career. Few pieces of art have divided opinion quite like My Bed – in whichTracey Emin claimed to have spent a week after a bad break-up. Complete with vodka bottles, cigarette butts and pregnancy tests, the installation didn’t […]
There are two shows currently taking place in New York that regard Obama as a touchstone. The first is Michelle Grabner’s festive floor at the Whitney Biennial, where the president stares with distinguished self-possession into the lens of photographer Daywoud Bey. Young and commanding, this is Obama before the announcement of his candidacy in 2008. The moment marks a progressive […]
Is there anything left to say about Richard Prince‘s notorious “Canal Zone” paintings and their attendant legal controversy? The case was finally settled, leaving its effect on copyright law uncertain. Art-world scolds who railed against Prince’s appropriation of photographer Patrick Cariou’s Rastafarian images have moved onto new causes. The dozen or so pictures, looking as if some of them might be […]
From the suggestive to the precarious, a new exhibition casts the humble chair in a new light, writes Louisa Buck. Q: When is a chair more than just a chair? A: When it is an artist’s chair. It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that sculpture can be experienced as much by the body as in […]
BAC is off to Frieze NY for the 3rd instalment of this excellent Fair (hopefully it will be a little less, ah, dramatic, this time…). Lots of other things are happening in New York at the same time, including the “satellite” Art Fairs: NADA, PULSE, and even “outsiders” are invited, to the Outsider Art Fair. […]
Montclair show tours the land artist’s Garden State legacy. On a frigid morning this past winter, the art historian, critic and curator Phyllis Tuchman was guiding her blue Mercedes sedan through the desolate parking lot of a shopping plaza in Bayonne, N.J., past a Super Stop & Shop, a Starbucks and a Houlihan’s, toward an […]
From Picasso’s formidable whores and Magritte’s provocative pipe to Pollock painting like and angel, the best 20th-centrury art reflects a world of flux, abstraction and imagination. The century was not yet out of its teens. For most of the small minority aware of the experiments of modern art, the bright colours of Matisse were still […]
From St Paul’s to the Gherkin, London’s skyline is full of history – and character. Will the new tower frenzy spoil all that? Oliver Wainwright lists his top 10 worst upstarts.
The Doctor travels through time to bring us the story of Surrealism Need some help getting to grips with Surrealism? The Doctor will see you now. Peter Capaldi, a former art student, and the latest actor to play Doctor Who, settles down on Freud’s couch to deliver his wry take on the Surrealist movement.
Next up in our series of the world’s most expensive living artists: the Americans. Auction results reveal both the usual suspects as well as some surprises, making this list more diverse than might have been expected. Some of these artists are auction darlings with thousands of works on the block, while others have had nary […]
In May 2013, German artist Gerhard Richter broke his own record when his 1968 painting “Domplatz, Mailand,” which looks like a fuzzy black-and-white photograph, sold at auction for $37 million, the highest amount for any living artist. It was a record he held for six months, until Jeff Koons’ “Balloon Dog” smashed it, selling for […]
artnet News’s ongoing series on the world’s most expensive living artists by nationality turns next to the French—after previous installments devoted to the Brits and the Germans. And a quick glance at the list below is enough to realize how isolated (others might say undervalued) the market for French art remains. Only three of the auction records presented […]
James Franco’s new exhibition at Pace is bad. It’s not a George W. Bush–caliber train wreck, but it’s close. The exhibition, “New Film Stills,” features 29 photographs from Franco’s series inspired by Cindy Sherman’s seminal “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–80). In each black-and-white photograph the artist-actor-scholar appears dressed (or undressed) in women’s clothes, often sporting a wig and makeup, for […]
Tracey Emin‘s sculpture My Bed (1998) is exactly what it sounds like: the work consists of the artist’s freshly slept-in bed, with crumpled pillows, disheveled sheets, and dirty tissues and other junk (including sanitary items, prophylactics, and liquor bottles) strewn around the footboard. When it debuted at 1999 at London’s Tate, it created an instant commotion in the […]
Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, “ART IS A LIE THAT JUST WON’T DIE,” 2014. HD Quicktime Movie, 6 minutes. Online. Everything you need to know about what makes art great, Museums and collecting, the life on an artist, and family – especially Mothers! And that’s a lot for a Video to cover – in just 6 […]
The painting caught Pei-Shen Qian’s eye, but it was the price that affected him deeply. Mr. Qian, browsing in a booth at a Manhattan art show a decade ago, had stumbled across his own work: a forgery of a modern masterpiece that he had recently completed. He had sold it for just a few hundred […]
For centuries, the art world and art market were dominated by men—just look at Giorgio Vasari’sThe Lives of the Artists, or, more recently, Jonathan Jones’s all-male list of the greatest artworks ever—but that’s beginning to change. Women now occupy top positions in every sector of the art world, and though they are still paid less than their male colleagues […]
We don’t have to tell you that art collecting is an expensive hobby. Who has the cash to drop $1 million or more on a single work because of a whim (or perhaps because another collector threatens to snap it up if you don’t)? Well, celebrities, that’s who. So artnet news has compiled a comprehensive […]
As scaffolding went up around the former Folk Art Museum building on Tuesday, one of its two architects broke his silence to say how devastated he and his partner are about the Museum of Modern Art’s decision to tear down “one of our most important buildings to date.” “Yes, all buildings one day will turn […]