It’s a textbook case. In New York two major museums are currently showing two different artists exploring more or less exactly the same subject: the saturation of images in society and the omnipresence of surveillance cameras, tying in to our worries about security....
Like some bizarre coincidence, you turn up at a museum, meet the exhibition’s co-curator, and as if by some power of mimicry, she could easily pass for one of the muses of the said artist. So it happened with Cécile Godefroy, co-curator of the major new show at the...
While the art world is in thrall to the latest fashions of contemporary art and the market, and while museums are ever more influenced (perhaps too much) by their generous patrons who keep these public institutions alive, New York has witnessed the birth a small...
There’s a strange microclimate in the land once ruled by the Dukes of Burgundy. It’s where you’ll find the impressive tomb of those monarchs of the Middle Ages, but that’s only scratching the surface... Ever since 1977 this town synonymous with mustard has also been...
The Norwegian art world’s undisputed star is a man who dragged himself through life in a state of existential malaise. His name is Edvard Munch (1863-1944). In his native city, Oslo, the museum that is devoted to him houses an immense treasure, an extraordinary number...
China is changing at lightning speed, and so are its artists. Communist folklore, gaudy-colored post-Pop artworks and giant portraits of grimacing people are long gone. Today, China’s artists have reached the apex of global relevance, art market practices and new...
This story takes place in a land known as the world’s top gas producer, the owner of the Paris Saint Germain soccer team, the 2002 World Cup Soccer organizer (and attendant controversies), and as the place from where Al-Jazeera’s Arabic- and English-language programs...
Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in March 1945, and he will never get over it. His entire oeuvre is steeped in the idea of war, ruin and violence, combined in clever doses with literature that ranges from Rimbaud to the Kabbalah. When he was a kid, Anselm Kiefer...
He came up onto the international art scene just a few years ago, but Danh Vo is already one of the stars of the globalized art scene, visible everywhere from New York’s Whitney Biennial to a retrospective at Mexico’s Jumex Museum to, in 2013, one at Paris’s Musée...
What is it that drives collectors to accumulate works of art, to get into debt, to travel around the world to see the works of their protégés and, sometimes, to eventually present the fruits of their labors to the public’s gaze? Back in 2008, I published Global...
In December 1915, something major happened in Saint Petersburg, which was then called Petrograd—a small revolution that would disrupt the course of art history all the way through to the 21st century. People have tended to forget these events, simply because Russia...
The first name to be exhibited in a major way at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Following are the demands and visions of this star of sensation-filled art on the occasion of a visit to his Berlin workshop. His name sounds...