https://youtu.be/O3TJaji4dVs 17 billion dollars in 2021 at auction Through hell and high water the world still has faith in art, or at least in the art market. The global public health crisis was not yet over when 17 billion dollars’ worth of...
Michael Armitage in Madrid before Basel: beauty makes the social message even more powerful
https://youtu.be/PW4IZ8UlY70 Opulent It’s an opulent kind of painting. Contrasting and shimmering hues, shapes arranged in spirals seemingly the product of reflections or anamorphoses. And these blurred representations, which even seem to have...
Art Dubai: from revisiting the region’s modern masters to exploring NFTs
The future “We know the future is a source of anxiety. To greet visitors we have therefore created an avatar to accompany them on their journey.” Brendan McGetrick is the creative director of the museum that has just opened in Dubai: the Museum...
Boilly: the 19th century artist who fascinates the 21st century
It's just an illusion Seeking to create illusions is one of the great virtues of art. It is a process that is often practiced in current creation. Without mentioning the entire hyperrealist school, we might think for example of Gerhard Richter,...
Kunstmuseum in Basel: Louise Bourgeois augmented through the eyes of Jenny Holzer
https://youtu.be/5ZQQ5IQ-UQQ Before everyone else It’s not a good thing to be right before everyone else. The artist Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) whose work is haunted by themes of trauma and femininity only started to gain recognition in the...
The Arco fair in Madrid with Joan Miro, Christian Boltanski, Thomas Schutte, Olafur Eliasson and Trisha Baga
Specialities Each fair has its own speciality. Some, like Frieze in London, New York and Los Angeles, are oriented towards novelties that tend to be very on trend. Art Basel in Switzerland and now Miami primarily displays the “blockbusters” of...
What can the Venice Biennale from the times of covid teach us? The artistic director Cecilia Alemani responds
https://youtu.be/a1VAviBtf5Y Finally the Venice Biennale Amid the great lethargy that’s descended on the world over the past two years, things have continued to advance, albeit at a slower pace and in a different way, including in art. This...
Charles Ray’s vanity of vanities : death, art history and humour at the Centre Pompidou and Pinault collection
https://youtu.be/OwcJ8lJnmVg Death's triumph In what is known as classical art, painters and sculptors used to amuse themselves by creating vanitas works: dead game lying on a table, flowers or fruit from different seasons arranged...
Oscar Murillo: The artist whose paintings allow him to infiltrate the world
https://youtu.be/RVCU9Qd68gg Romanticism Artists can have a kind of 21st-century romanticism, if we can call it that, which means that some of them aren’t satisfied with recognition. They’ll call into question all the signs that bring them...
The Book of Veles: It’s not a photojournalism masterpiece, it’s a masterpiece of fake news
https://youtu.be/i7NMTCqpnEA Magnum There can be no doubt that the photographer Jonas Bendiksen (born in 1977) is nothing if not audacious. This Norwegian member of Magnum, the press agency founded during the postwar period by names...
Levy, Gorvy, Dayan, Rohatyn (LGDR): the new global consortium of the contemporary art market
Paris again Paris is in the process of once again becoming, with dizzying speed, a major hub for the global art market. On 26 January 2022 an announcement was made by the organizers of Art Basel that they would be taking over as the...
The cult of Marcel Proust: three exhibitions on the great writer known for his taste for memory and for shining a light on homosexuality
https://youtu.be/GukeCQhqTxI Paris memories Cities carry within them the memory of the filmmakers, painters and writers who have inhabited them. For they play a key role in their creation. Paris is one of those magical places that allows us to...