This story takes place in a land known as the world’s top gas producer, the owner of the Paris Saint Germain soccer team, the 2002 World Cup Soccer organizer (and attendant controversies), and as the place from where Al-Jazeera’s Arabic- and English-language programs...
In a world region torn by terrible conflicts, a small oasis is betting on the art market in a striking manner. In Dubai, the United Arab Emirates’ epicenter of tourism and banking, Alserkal Avenue is a 46,500 square-meter (500,521 square-foot) area in a former marble...
There are a few of this type in the world, very few, who devote part of their obviously substantial assets to contemporary art. Women of a rather warrior type who are independent and, above all, motivated by a precise vision. In France, Maja Hoffman comes to mind: The...
Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in March 1945, and he will never get over it. His entire oeuvre is steeped in the idea of war, ruin and violence, combined in clever doses with literature that ranges from Rimbaud to the Kabbalah. When he was a kid, Anselm Kiefer...
How do you recognize a true artist? He creates an entire universe that is unique and powerful. He dreams and turns his dreams into tangible objects that make you dream. Among the abundant projects of uneven quality realized on the occasion of Paris’s COP21 climate...
In a very short amount of time, Hong Kong businessman Adrian Cheng, 36, has become a ubiquitous character in the globalized art world. In the space of two years, he’s emerged as an important funder for New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where he financed an education...
Arriving in Beirut always makes a big impression. You’re told the road to the airport is dangerous because it’s the path along which Hezbollah settled. My driver discretely crosses himself before taking the wheel. A bad omen? Farther on, just outside a tunnel, a suite...
First and foremost, Miami is an atmosphere. The Floridian city is a strange combination of showboating, bling cars throbbing like Ferraris down Collins Avenue, girls in very short skirts struggling to walk in their very high heels and elderly people here to find...
He came up onto the international art scene just a few years ago, but Danh Vo is already one of the stars of the globalized art scene, visible everywhere from New York’s Whitney Biennial to a retrospective at Mexico’s Jumex Museum to, in 2013, one at Paris’s Musée...
What is it that drives collectors to accumulate works of art, to get into debt, to travel around the world to see the works of their protégés and, sometimes, to eventually present the fruits of their labors to the public’s gaze? Back in 2008, I published Global...
The art market doesn’t do art justice. In other words, on one side of the ring are modes of art consumption centered on contemporary art, and on the other is art history, filtered by centuries of well-informed eyes. It’s become abundantly clear nowadays that...
In December 1915, something major happened in Saint Petersburg, which was then called Petrograd—a small revolution that would disrupt the course of art history all the way through to the 21st century. People have tended to forget these events, simply because Russia...