Slow down The art market always has a few surprises up its sleeve. While at the New York auctions in May prices showed a certain degree of slow-down - naturally enough, given the global context - at the opening of the Art Basel fair on 12 June...
Hélène Leloup is a legend of the African art market
2 kind of dealers You could say there are two kinds of art dealers. There are the ones who are obsessed with business, and with generating income to support their activities. Generally, they aren’t able to keep their best objects. And then...
Hans Ulrich Obrist: urgent confessions from a child of art
https://youtu.be/3rlfatblqWQ 1968 The story begins in 1968. The year that was defined by a generation who, across the world, proclaimed their desire for freedom. 1968 was also the year that marked the death of the French turned American artist,...
The big wave of Picasso bashing
https://youtu.be/3KxxqAGvRkA Celebrations The museums of the world are vibrating in unison to the tune of Pablo Picasso. Sprawling celebrations are being staged to mark fifty years since the Spanish master’s death. In New York alone the art...
In Venice for the Biennale, the architecture constructs a little and deconstructs a lot: interviews
https://youtu.be/o547_HrrfJE Impactful buildings Architecture these days is facing two major strong and opposing trends. On the one hand it is expressed through its conquest of large-scale sites across the planet, through the construction of...
Three disappointments that reveal new contemporary art market trends in New York
https://youtu.be/X9D_UNm5uDA Disappointments always There are always disappointments at auction: idolized artists whose works sell for lower prices than expected, or even go unsold. It’s this element of uncertainty that lends everything its...
Van Gogh two months before his suicide
https://youtu.be/x199M1lHuRA The two very last month There is not only the Vermeer exhibition to see in Amsterdam. The Van Gogh Museum is also presenting an exceptional exhibition featuring 48 paintings and 25 drawings exclusively dedicated...
Basquiat is still the star of the New York contemporary sales but so is Rubens…
Increasingly expensive Against all odds the market for 20th and 21st century art is becoming increasingly expensive. This is what we learn from observing the recent results in the auction rooms of New York and London. We recall that in November...
Inside the mind of Norman Foster at the Centre Pompidou
https://youtu.be/ViGaTcP8XPw Travel hopefully “To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.” This famous phrase from Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson can be perfectly applied to the new large-scale exhibition at the Centre...
The Marcel Broodthaers sale: the artist who has challenged the value principles of contemporary art
https://youtu.be/EHhigM53ILw Anton Herbert “It was in 1968. We were very conventional. We didn’t understand much at the time. Thanks to Broodthaers we received an electroshock. He was a fascinating man, a poet. He gave us his vision. He...
Berlin: Ulysses Jenkins, the first African American video artist. History’s missing link
The history of African American art https://youtu.be/DRwS_JCxbl0 He’s the missing link in the history of African American art: Ulysses Jenkins (born in 1946). We could locate him within this chronology between Charles White, a chronicler of...
Degas/Manet: two competing geniuses in Paris then New York
https://youtu.be/FDkRczRWVl0 More questions than answers The Musée d’Orsay has a particular fondness for Edgar Degas (1834-1917). We can understand why. He is one of the geniuses of modernity. However the last exhibition on him, “Degas à...