A couple of decades ago, this writer's handbag 'disappeared' at the edge of Montreuil, a gritty eastern suburb of Paris once best known for its marché des voleurs, or thieves' market. In recent years, however, artists have been flocking to Montreuil, drawn by its proximity to the capital and affordable real estate. It's not yet Brooklyn, but...
The art market seems to defy most conventional laws of economics, but has historically obeyed the law of supply and demand, prizing the rare above what is easily come by, and the unique above all. Increasingly, however, even this principle is looking wobbly, as art that comes in multiples gains in appeal and value.
Overwhelming passion, tons of sex, or a brand new kitchen: desire can manifest in many forms. When the book, des/Ire: Designing Houses for Contemporary Ireland, came out in 2008, the cover featured all three. A moody-looking man appeared to be about to shove a strawberry tart in the face (or cleavage) of an elegant model, who had for some reason...
ABOUT SAM McKINNISS: He is so out of the ordinary, and so unusually well-equipped to write about himself if he cared to, that writing about him feels presumptuous. And truthfully, most of what's been written about my own work, including by me, has always seemed alien to what I had in mind. How something is made, and why something is made, is a...
Who is Slim Stealingworth? He wrote an 80-page essay for a Tom Wesselmann monograph in 1980. He also penned various catalogue essays for Wesselmann until 2002, two years before the American pop artist's death. 'Many of these earliest works began with finding a piece of wood that seemed special,' Stealingworth notes about Wesselmann's process.
LONDON — Following Baghdad's fall to US troops in 2003, more than 15,000 artifacts were looted from the National Museum of Iraq by thieves. The presence of ISIS went on to facilitate further destruction of ancient culture in the country, yet looting and pillaging in Iraq is nothing new. Western archaeologists have been laying their claim...
Organized by seminal conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth, 'Dot, Point, Period,' a Curated Installation by Joseph Kosuth covers every square foot of wall at the Castelli Gallery's 40th Street space. A selection of artworks by over 40 artists are dispersed within a continuous string of short texts. This string of text, in a three-inch typeface...
To enter Marcus Jahmal's Bushwick home and studio, I squeeze past a giant canvas leaning against the hallway stairs—a sunset through an open window, stratified like sand art in a vase, its horizon pulled apart into infinite variations, infinite color. The home studio is stuffed with work, evidence of the restless energy with which he paints....
Art Basel 2019 opens to the public on Thursday, June 13, with two preview days, on June 11 and 12. Some 290 galleries from 34 countries will show work at the Swiss fair, which runs through June 16.
All that remained were 48 hats. 48 hats and 48 coats. 48 hats and 48 coats and 48 pairs of shoes. They lay, folded, in six lines of eight, the discarded wear of 48 absent men or the uniform of a single man, repeated some 48 times.
Where should we start? Van der Weyden, for example. I am standing in front of The Descent from the Cross. I often come to look at this painting. One day, after lots of visits, I realized that its intense presence was due to something very concrete – the subjects are enclosed within a very narrow kind of frame. If you look at the corners of the...
I never quite noticed how nervous a smile Jennifer Lopez wore on the night of the 42nd Grammy Awards in 2000, until I saw Sam McKinniss' interpretation in his Brooklyn studio—the painting, part of a collection of new works being shipped to Brussels at Almine Rech Gallery for the New York artist's first solo show in Europe. For the show, he...
There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries...
February, 1888. A small, cheerless room in the south of France. Vincent Van Gogh has come here to escape the grey Paris light, but this doesn't seem much better. He flings down his heavy pack, takes a seat on a lone wooden chair, unlaces his boots. Yes, you think, have a nap; this is all exhausting. But no – he arranges the beaten-up old shoes on...
Since the election of President Trump, there has been a fascination with anything that might explain flyover America to the urban elite. J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy and Tara Westover's Educated are best selling memoirs of escape from Middletown, Ohio, and southeastern Idaho, respectively, each author detailing the dysfunction of families and...
The excellent figurative painter, Joe Andoe, specializing in horses and landscapes, hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, but he has lived in New York since 1982 (works in a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard). His brand of high poetic realism can be linked to the photorealism that was popular in the Eighties, but the paintings he makes are not so much...
Curated by Mika Yoshitake, Parergon: Japanese Art of the 1980s and 1990s forms a corollary to her 2012 Blum & Poe exhibition Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, which presented a much-needed introduction to a group of postwar Japanese artists whose works have now been aligned with more recognizable Western European movements such as...
Jeff Koons is back. The American artist and art commerce kingpin has just opened his latest show at Oxford's Ashmolean, the world's oldest public museum. Seventeen significant works – 14 of which make their first appearance on UK soil – span the artist's career and radically distinctive oeuvre including Equilibrium, Antiquity and Gazing Ball...
The first image to greet the visitor at the entrance to this exhibition, arranged across three galleries in Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, is a life-sized photo portrait of Jeff Koons in his New York studio. Standing on a plinth, he gazes out at the viewer, one hand holding a deep-blue glass sphere that, like the mirror in the 'Arnolfini Portrait'...
Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality –...
Madison Square Park succeeds for that same reason. In one of the city’s most congested areas, it provide an oasis for the white collar workers and wealthy elites that have populated the Flatiron District for centuries. But ceramicist Arlene Shechet has little interest in padding this peaceful narrative with Full Steam Ahead, an exhibition of...
While Fashion Week's SS19 shows are but a sweet memory as we head into winter, there's one show that will last in our minds till next May.
LONDON—In 1981, the Royal Academy of Arts in London put on an exhibition of 20 th century painting that changed the art world. A New Spirit in Painting was 'a manifesto,' the accompanying catalogue said; it showcased a set of contemporary, mostly European painters, whose work possessed qualities—figurative, narrative, emotional...
In two cases testing copyright law in social media, the artist Richard Prince is asking a federal court in Manhattan to rule that two of his Instagram-based works constitute fair use of photographs taken by others. Both are from Prince's 2014 New Portraits series, in which he enlarged and printed Instagram posts with such images.
