What does it mean to be a political artist in this day and age? I can already see readers deliberating whether to close their screens… But don’t go anywhere, this won’t be boring. The most high profile political artist working today is Ai Weiwei. He posts, tweets, and...
When you travel around the world attending contemporary art fairs as I often do, you come to the realisation that these commercial events multiplying across the world are not unlike hotels. If luxury travellers are drawn to those grand, imposing palaces fitted out to...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4INLxy-ztgI Once upon a time, a country the size of a continent was slowly throwing off the shackles of authoritarianism. Citizens were beginning to travel abroad, accumulate possessions, launch new enterprises, and come...
What exactly do we mean when we talk about an art dealer’s collection? Is it the artworks they haven’t sold or is it their prized possessions? Christie’s has announced that this October in London it will be auctioning Leslie Waddington’ s collection. The revered...
Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is one of the most revered photographers of the modern age. Her appeal stems in large part from her rare ability to capture the uniqueness and even the pain in her subjects. A tense child gripping a toy grenade; a monstrous giant in the...
The streets are completely empty. A few forsaken pedestrians pass at irregular intervals along the pavement. Here we are in Arlington Heights, the low-rent neighbourhood in Central Los Angeles. There’s nothing much to report aside from the slight reigning melancholy...
The first time the Guggenheim New York honoured a Chinese artist with an exhibition the year was 2008 and the artist in question was Cai Guo Qiang. Even if his name is almost impossible to pronounce for western people, his artworks (born in 1957 in Quanzhou City,...
This is the story of a man who in 1969 opened a store selling jeans and ended up with a ready-to-wear empire spanning 3,100 outlets across the globe. It’s also the story of the simple son of a cabinet-maker from San Francisco who accumulated a collection of...
Art by authors is the big thing right now. The Palais de Tokyo in Paris is placing Michel Houellebecq's uneven photography in the spotlight. Galerie du Passage is exhibiting the french writer Francoise Sagan's deliberately out-of-focus photographs, albeit poorly...
The Rencontres d'Arles photography festival stages forty exhibitions dotted around the small Provençal city best known as the place where Vincent Van Gogh cut off a small piece of his ear. But let’s leave Van Gogh to one side today, even if the brand new foundation...
The whiff of scandal seems to follow Andres Serrano (born 1950), but as an artist he’s so much more than that. Of course there was ‘Immersion (Piss Christ)’ from 1987, a highly stylised photograph of a crucifix submerged in a multi-coloured liquid that we know to be...
Long before Andy Warhol dreamed of being an art-making machine and more or less managed it with his silkscreens on canvas, Antwerp’s Pierre Paul Rubens (1577-1640), a legend in a different art genre, designed his own great machine for pumping out paintings. On 6th and...