Information has a resounding impact in the art market not when it addresses such notions as beauty, aesthetic renewal or visual research, but rather when it uses superlatives: it’s always the most expensive, the biggest, the most spectacular. In the race to extremes...
The museums with the richest collections of paintings always stage the most beautiful temporary exhibitions of Old Masters art. This is, quite simply, because these collections constitute a great currency of exchange. But it’s also because they naturally attract the...
Artists have an advantage over mere mortals in that the fruit of their torments can give rise to great works of art. They are able to express their contradictions and allow them to play out on canvas, creating a sort of tension that appeals to the viewer’s emotions....
The day I understood the contemporary art market (the market as opposed to the art itself) was the day I realized that everything in this industry is a question of confidence. The art market isn’t about justice for art nor art history. In an age when virtuosity and...
There are two trends currently shaping the art market. The first is the presence of an art with some kind of political dimension, be it environmental awareness, feminism, or a problematic American presidency... The second is that galleries are having trouble selling...
The Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa (born in 1975), the eighteenth richest man in Japan according to Forbes, founder of Japan's largest online fashion mall, Zozotown, became an overnight celebrity in May 2017 when he announced that he’d purchased an enormous...
The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is staging an exhibition dedicated to Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the hero of contemporary American painting, comprising 120 works that are emblematic of the artist. The ensemble of paintings and drawings presented here,...
The American businessman Mitchell Rales (born in 1956) can’t be said to be wanting for money. Forbes values the wealth of this man, who started out in real estate in 1983, at 3.5 billion dollars and ranks him 652nd in their list of the world’s richest people in 2018....
One woman has her breasts showing through her white, nearly transparent shirt as she hacks away with a sword amid great spurts of blood at a man who only moments earlier was perhaps her lover. The other’s neckline dips low to reveal a milky-white neck, her head tilted...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXETztMZjZI Pablo Picasso lived to the age of 92. His total painting output is estimated to number over 4000 works. It’s conceivable that he could have produced 120 paintings between the ages of 20 and 25. At that time the...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj_FQj_faHw Imagine a world where the most popular slogan among young people is “peace and love”, a world where chemically induced paradises are the norm, where the orderly and materialist virtues of the capitalist middle...
Jackson Pollock, Napoleon, Hirohito, Marie Antoinette, Oscar Wilde, Adam Smith, Malcolm X, Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Sigmund Freud, four twelfth-century popes, Andy Warhol, and many...