There’s a joke we like to tell in France, one you could imagine inspiring one of his 'Joke painting' by American artist Richard Prince. A man driven to suicide jumps off the top of a skyscraper. On the way down, he says the same thing each floor he passes: ‘So far,...
Every May and November, Sotheby’s and Christie’s modern and contemporary art auctions in New York have become, rightly or wrongly, a shop window for the global art business and a bellwether for the market in the eyes of the general public. In a few lots, everything is...
When it comes to art, there’s a strange microclimate in Brussels. The European capital is home to a surprising number of seasoned collectors with particular interests in those rather challenging art forms people tend to term avant-garde. One of the best illustrations...
‘Each time you talk to your friends on Facebook, each time you buy a book on Amazon, each time you save for your pension fund, you’re dealing with a company practicing tax optimisation. We’re not talking drug trafficking. It frequently turns out that these...
It's a story that has got the entire old master world talking. And it begins like the best art market myths: in 2014 a family in Toulouse, in the south-west of France, while doing work on their house, discovered a canvas in the attic which appeared to be from the...
Picabia, Duchamp, Bellmer... Major names in the history of modern art and, it would seem, completely out of most people’s price range nowadays. In Paris, however, the cradle of Surrealism and Dadaism, you can find highly specialised book and manuscript auctions...
-It’s a massive sale of photographs: 316 prints, the vast majority of them vintage. -It’s a sale devoted to a major photographer, Philippe Halsman (1906-1979), who holds the record for Life Magazine covers (he has 101 to his name), invented ‘jump’ photography (when...
‘There was a lot of expectation and nervousness when the fair opened its doors. Sales figures at Chinese auctions have been underwhelming but the contemporary art market is establishing itself strongly in Asia.’ Its through these nuanced arguments that Marc Spiegler,...
In art there are those mythical places believed to have changed the course of history. Until the nineteenth century, if you considered yourself a serious painter you were obliged to make an initiatory journey to Italy on the trail of the Renaissance and Ancient Rome....
270 galleries, from antiques to contemporary art, land in the Dutch city for nine days It is by no means the most expensive work on show at the 2016 edition of Tefaf Maastricht but it’s one of the most affecting. The Parisian gallery Kevorkian, which specializes in...
The Armory Show is an event that is eagerly awaited in New York. The longest-running fair in the world capital of contemporary art, bringing together 205 galleries, appointed its new director, the former art journalist Benjamin Genocchio, last December just as global...
There are those who claim that the art market is globalised but as the Swiss dealer Ernst Beyeler used to say in the '90s, ‘The Italians buy Italian, the Americans buy American and the Germans buy German.’ Arco, which opened on Thursday, provides an interesting...