https://youtu.be/1LrnSLhWSqE Erudition and execution “The act of painting is the longest and the most difficult. You need the erudition of a composer, but also the execution required to play the violin.” Eugène Delacroix wrote these words in...
Tristan and Isolde with video: director Peter Sellars discusses his grandiose collaboration with Bill Viola on Wagner’s opera
https://youtu.be/bMHlM4vrKwU Breathtaking show https://youtu.be/gDnhefqIRoY For the sixth time, Paris’s opera house is staging Wagner’s great opera, Tristan and Isolde, accompanied by images from Bill Viola (born in 1951) and directed by the...
Alex Katz at the Guggenheim museum: What matters to me is the idea of the present moment
https://youtu.be/ewBKSBa7aoc Guggenheim Not all artists merit the Guggenheim. The famous spiral-shaped building in New York designed by Frank Lloyd Wright is a death knell for those whose career is half-baked, overly repetitive and...
Jehan Chu: “The NFT will be the paintbrush and canvas of the future”
https://youtu.be/je_XkQBXLfg Jehan Chu Jehan Chu, founder of a crypto-investments company in Hong Kong called Kenetic Capital, worked at Sotheby’s in a former life before becoming a freelance art advisor and then dedicating himself...
Contemporary art seen from Sao Paulo (to Arles)
Turbulent events Brazil continues to face turbulent events. In 2021, while the vast country was still in shock from the chaos of the pandemic but also amid major upheavals from the reign of Bolsonaro, who openly declared his antipathy towards...
Christian Marclay: images of sounds at the Centre Pompidou
Forms of sounds What forms can we give to sounds? It’s a strange question, but it was posed in the early 20th century by major artists such as Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. In our current age there is another artist, the Swiss American who...
Anri Sala: Two minutes before death against the soundtrack of a clarinet
https://youtu.be/Vn-WM_Uzuz8 The shuttle Challenger On 28 January 1986 the American space shuttle Challenger exploded, exactly 73 seconds after take-off. There were seven astronauts on board, including Ronald McNair, a seasoned musician who...
Art Basel Miami Beach: A unique artistic ecosystem
20 years ago Art Basel emerged at Miami Beach 20 years ago and since then no other art fair has made such a powerful impact on a city. For a long time fun-loving Miami has been on the receiving end of bad press, and the fair, since the early...
Travel through space with Yves Klein
https://youtu.be/OZeB6jA9KY4 With Saint Rita of Cascia “Saint Rita of Cascia, patron of impossible and desperate cases, thank you for all the powerful, decisive, marvellous help that you have given me up to now (…) Even if I am personally...
At the New York auctions there were paintings for keen connoisseurs or speculators
Vandalism On 18 November 2022 two environmental activists from the French movement known as “Dernière Rénovation” (Last Renovation) poured orange acrylic paint over a massive stainless steel sculpture, an equestrian self-portrait by American...
Abu Dhabi: a creative fair in collaboration with the Louvre AD and the future Guggenheim
Supported by the state It’s the only fair of its kind: a commercial show that’s entirely supported by the state, as a cultural event in its own right. Abu Dhabi Art, which features 80 exhibitors from 33 countries, is an event that has existed...
The new natural illusions of Olafur Eliasson
https://youtu.be/ohJSf3ag_9Q A new vocabulary There are certain artists – and they are rare – who are capable of inventing an entire vocabulary. This is true of the Icelandic-Danish artist who lives in Berlin, Olafur Eliasson (born in 1967),...