It’s official, the art market is picking up after years spent in a post-crash lull. According to TEFAF’s much discussed annual art market report, 2013 was the second best year on record, grossing €47.42 billion ($65.45). It was topped only by 2007, the vintage year of the last bubble. In this new series, artnet News […]
The answer is yes and no. Let’s begin with why Silicon Valley Contemporarycould be a success. The obvious allure for creating this new fair, and for the 50-some participating galleries to buy in for its first year, is that the tech sphere headquartered in Silicon Valley is generating more wealth more quickly than anywhere else in […]
If the market for contemporary art is in danger of overheating, the first canary in the coal mine will surely be those fashionable young artists whose prices have been driven up by speculators over the past few years. Midseason auctions of affordable works by emerging names are telling temperature gauges for the contemporary market. Phillips’s […]
There’s an mesmerizing aberration at David Zwirner Gallery, a technological siren that, once it locks its fearsome eyes on you, will drag you deep into the Uncanny Valley and feast on your brain. Occupying its own cavelike room in the gallery, which the viewer is encouraged to enter alone, this animatronic sculpture—a buxom blonde woman in […]
Ai Weiwei’s Colored Vases appeared at Seattle Asian Art Museum on April 5, quivering, just waiting to be smashed. Poor vases. Their cheerful, rainbow-candy appearance is so dumb it’s almost touching. They’re baubles with hidden stories, stories that go back two thousand years. But we’ll start with 1993. That year, Chinese artist Ai Weiwei returned to Beijing […]
A generic, brand video. Check out the Video. Do you “buy” what they are selling?
From Bacchus weaving his spell in a Spanish street to Gilbert and George getting gradually drunk on Gordon’s, here’s our pick of pieces in which booze plays a key part. Velázquez – The Triumph of Bacchus or The Drinkers (1628-1629) In this ironic masterpiece, the Spanish painter whose career took him from portraying the street […]
The comedy of a naive self-portrait apparently helped humanise the man most responsible for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. His portrait of Putin actually looks like something you would find in one of America’s trash-rich Salvation Army stores and buy to laugh at. It’s got a classic amateur clumsiness and oddity to it. Bush has […]
It was the exhibition that everyone seemed so eager to hate: Mega-dealer Larry Gagosian’s Lower East Side “pop-up” space, open through May 23, showcasing sculptures by Urs Fischer inside a former Chase bank on Delancey Street. (Another gallery outpost at 821 Park Avenue is hosting his massive bronze piece, “last supper.”) “How’s Gagmewithaspoon?,” my friend […]
The past year has seen collectors and auction houses creating their own art market. They’re essentially bypassing dealers, galleries, and critics, identifying artists on their own, buying works by those artists cheaply in great numbers, then flipping them at vastly higher prices to a network of other like-minded speculator-collectors. Thus, we’ve seen the rise of […]
The herd is spooked. That’s one interpretation of why there has been so much outrage over the the borderline heretical views that the collector Stefan Simchowitz espoused in Artspace‘s recent interview with him—what he said has evidently struck a chord that resonates jarringly with collectors, dealers, artists, curators… everyone, really. A collector who has amassed a hoard of recent art, […]
Over Facebook, I asked an informal question about who pays artists. I wasn’t surprised by the results. Many artists, including those still in school, tend to pay other artists, actors, and writers who’ve assisted with the production of a work. Even those with limited means tend to exchange work, materials, or other barterable goods. Contrast […]
Chris Burden In 1972, visitors attending Burden’s show at Mizuno Gallery in Los Angeles were treated to what appeared to be a crime scene, with a covered cadaver lying on La Cienega Boulevard, surrounded by police flares. In fact, it was the artist himself “making a piece of sculpture,” as he later put it. He […]
March 8 was International Women’s Day, and though few people remember this occasion in America, in Russia we celebrate it as a major national holiday. Every March since my Soviet childhood I was reminded to appreciate all the intelligent and hard-working women who have played a pivotal role in my life and generally made our world […]
If you bring up the name Stefan Simchowitz in the company of art dealers, collectors, advisors, or other professionals, you are bound to get a vigorous reaction. A producer of Hollywood movies like “Requiem for a Dream” and a co-founder of MediaVast, the photo-licensing site that was sold to Getty Images in 2007 for $200 million, Simchowitz is one of […]
“I don’t want to tell you this work is about women,” said artist Jordan Wolfson over the phone, “because I don’t think that’s true.” Wolfson, a 33-year-old artist who works in video, performance, and sculpture, was on a lunch break at a special effects studio in Los Angeles where he was developing his latest work, […]
Check out the video of cutting edge Animatronics by Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner Gallery, NYC. No, we really mean it – check it out and watch the Video, and enlarge it!
“Do you think I’m rich?” asks a male voice. “Yes,” says a female voice. “Do you think I’m a homosexual?” “No.” That exchange is the sole dialogue in Jordan Wolfson’s 14-minute video “Raspberry Poser”, currently projected on massive wall at David Zwirner, and the only clue Wolfson offers to his intentions. That is, if it’s […]
We Go to the Gallery, is a book which is a riff on what’s popularly known in the UK as the Peter and Jane series — early readers that have been published by the Penguin UK imprint Ladybird Books since the 1960s. The Peter and Jane books show the siblings of the same names, plus their Mummy, […]
Money continues to pour into art, and with it, stories multiply about art’s manipulation by callow titans of finance. Speaking of the recent decade, one pundit said not so long ago: “The conversation has turned from ‘Is art an asset class?’ to ‘Art is an asset class,’ and then to ‘How do we take advantage […]