https://youtu.be/iRPVvzwfR68 Injustice to a black man While the United States reverberates with violence over the injustice done to a black man, George Floyd, who died as a result of the racism of a police officer in Minneapolis who believed...
Tribute to Christo: the art of gigantism and the impossible
Christo died on 31 May 2020 at the age of 84. He was one of the very first artists that I interviewed early on in my career. I went to meet him in 1993 at his studio in Soho in New York, where I made his acquaintance through the dealer Daniel Varenne, now also...
Sotheby’s: the great revolution in the art market
Patrick Drahi It hit the art market like a bolt from the blue. On 17 June 2019, the French Moroccan-born businessman Patrick Drahi, who specializes in media and telecommunications, announced he had bought one of the world’s two leading auction...
Waiting for the art market’s “corona prices”
Silence It’s exceedingly difficult to get insiders to talk about the current evolution of the art market. A number of them refuse to make any statement, others tend to stick to abstract analyses, while a third group prefers to remain...
The world Afterwards (5): Oscar Murillo joint winner of the Turner Prize: “We have locally imagined some measures to mitigate the social collapse”
Between England and Colombia Oscar Murillo is a young artist (born in 1986) who lives between London and the village where he was born in Colombia, and he truly is a multifaceted figure. Sharing the Turner Prize There’s been a lot of talk...
Tribute to Germano Celant, major theoretician of 20th-century art
A Living encyclopedia of 20th century art The art historian and curator Germano Celant(1940-2020) has passed away on 29 April 2020, after contracting the coronavirus . He was one of the most fascinating figures in 20th-century art, which he...
The world afterwards (3) Albanian prime minister and artist Edi Rama: “It’s a major failure. The world is unable to be together”
Tirana in bright colors His first great exploit dates from the 2000s. Edi Rama (born in 1964) was the newly elected mayor of Tirana, the capital of Albania (a country with 2.8 million inhabitants), when he decided to have a number of the...
The world afterwards (2) Subodh Gupta: “what is happening to us now must not be forgotten”
To reinvent obsessions The main strength of artists lies in their ability to reinvent identical obsessions. We are familiar with Subodh Gupta’s work through his installations – accumulations of metal kitchen utensils that have become the...
The world afterwards (1): Anish Kapoor: “ As long as we continue with a system that banks everything on profits, nothing will change”
Leviathan: 72000m3 It was announced in 2011 but it was very difficult to grasp its importance at the time. When the Grand Palais in Paris staged an extraordinary show entitled Monumenta, following the participation of Richard Serra and Anselm...
The art market during the Second World War: fake bargains and overlooked promising values
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1LdRmFZdnU War War. Economists and politicians alike are readily comparing the impact of the coronavirus to that of a military conflict. The 20th century’s most devastating and traumatising conflict was the...
How museums are responding to the crisis : the reactions of directors from Los Angeles to Saint Petersburg (1)
Museums: the highest idea of a man “The museum, after all, is one of the places that give us the highest idea of man (…) The role of museums in our relationship with works of art is so great that we can hardly conceive of the fact that they...
Art market: Lessons from previous crises, from an unpaid for Van Gogh to the resurgence of young artists…
Crises comes and go Crises in the art market come and go, and no two are quite alike, but they can help us to understand how market values may be called into question. The crisis sweeping the world today and affecting the economy and the art...