Imagine buying a painting for $19,000 in 1984 it being sold for $110.5 million in 2017. That’s what happened on Thursday 18 May at Sotheby’s when the hammer fell on the sale (with fees) of a Jean Michel Basquiat canvas from 1982 depicting a skull against a blue...
‘It’s apparently easier to sell a $30 million Picasso than a Henri Cartier-Bresson for 8,000 euros these days’. This statement by Johannes Faber, an Austrian dealer specialising in modern photography, is based on recent results in the market. On 15 May in New York the...
Regardless of what people say each time about the overall standard at the Venice Biennale, and despite the growing number of challengers from Sao Paulo to Shanghai, this event remains the queen of the world’s contemporary art shows. With 900 works at the international...
If the role of art in your life amounts to concerns such as whether the painting in your living room matches the colour of your sofa then you should probably steer clear of the 57th Venice Biennale where the largest exhibition, the international pavilion, is ‘curated’...
Impressionist and modern sales have been moving in a strange direction of late. Adopting marketing strategies that are unusual to say the least, they respond to a market where ‘high quality items are rare and demand is stronger than ever,’ as Thomas Seydoux, the Swiss...
It can be difficult finding one’s way among all these biennales – the new tourist panaceas – flourishing across the planet. This rainy spring, for example, in Jutland in the middle of Denmark, separated by 80km and only a few weeks apart from each other, there is a...
It’s a vast continent containing an array of political and religious realities, unique histories and countless languages. That's Africa, a jigsaw of identities. Art critics, however, still have a tendency to use the catchall term ‘African art’. As if there was such...
‘It has to be said, there were a lot of young artists doing it for the money. In recent years, we’ve seen the market go into overdrive for these precocious talents. Artists between 25 and 28 whose works were selling for 50,000 to 100,000 euros and more. But the crisis...
‘The Thinker’, ‘The Kiss’... Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is a giant of sculpture whose most famous works have almost become clichés (on this idea of Rodin as a cliché, see the new work by Urs Fischer – a life-sized version of 'The Kiss' in Plasticine, as...
Belgium has its own microclimate for art. On the one hand, since the ’70s the country has developed an established tradition for boundary-pushing art collections (see for example the fabulous Herbert foundation in Gent (www.herbertfoundation.org) and MoMA’s purchase...
Jeff Koons (born 1955) is one of those artists who inspires fascination and revulsion in equal measure. On the occasion of his 2014 retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, I was astonished to find myself subjected to vitriolic online attacks after I defended his show,...
Until 5 June, the Grand Palais in Paris has a lavishly produced exhibition featuring 278 extraordinary treasures belonging to Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani, son of a former Qatari prime minister and cousin of the current Emir. In France, this family is also known...