While History shows as a whole, and the Renaissance in particular, that posterity has a predilection for works by artists afflicted by madness, the art market is far more rational agent. Artworks that are too large, too complicated, too noisy, in other words too...
Overlooked during her lifetime, Carol Rama is enjoying a spectacular success two years after she died at the age of 97. Currently the Palazzo Ca’Nova in Venice and the New Museum in New York are both showing the artist’s work. Hailing from Turin, Carol Rama produced a...
The tragedy of great artists is their far-sightedness means they’re often misunderstood. Take the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the very big names in world photography, someone who in the 1930s was throwing himself into a new genre we refer to...
On 25 and 26 May, the fifteenth edition of Loop took place in Barcelona. A one-of-a-kind fair devoted solely to video art, it takes an original formula for a genre that which is still finding its bearings. In a hotel in the city centre, 44 galleries each had a room...
Magisterial, beautiful and comprehensively documented. ' Primitive Picasso' at the Musée du Quai Branly is pieced together like a police investigation and questions commonly held assumptions about the greatest painter of the 20th century,Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). Or...
The brilliance of certain artists lies in their ability to force you to really look at what they have to show. It’s true of German-born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Slowly but surely he’s become one of the superstars of contemporary art, and...
In the '90s HBO aired ‘Dream On’, a US series where the lead character at key moments had flashbacks of clips from TV shows he’d watched in his childhood. It was a way of saying that all adults born since the '60s are TV babies, shaped by its images, its theme tunes,...
Imagine buying a painting for $19,000 in 1984 it being sold for $110.5 million in 2017. That’s what happened on Thursday 18 May at Sotheby’s when the hammer fell on the sale (with fees) of a Jean Michel Basquiat canvas from 1982 depicting a skull against a blue...
‘It’s apparently easier to sell a $30 million Picasso than a Henri Cartier-Bresson for 8,000 euros these days’. This statement by Johannes Faber, an Austrian dealer specialising in modern photography, is based on recent results in the market. On 15 May in New York the...
Regardless of what people say each time about the overall standard at the Venice Biennale, and despite the growing number of challengers from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, this event remains the queen of the world’s contemporary art shows. With 900 works at the international...
If the role of art in your life amounts to concerns such as whether the painting in your living room matches the colour of your sofa then you should probably steer clear of the 57th Venice Biennale where the largest exhibition, the international pavilion, is ‘curated’...
Impressionist and modern sales have been moving in a strange direction of late. Adopting marketing strategies that are unusual to say the least, they respond to a market where ‘high quality items are rare and demand is stronger than ever,’ as Thomas Seydoux, the Swiss...