Anyone familiar with the art market will still recall with shock that day in 2007, when a media-friendly collector from Las Vegas named Steve Wynn proudly unveiled one of his treasures, a voluptuous canvas by Picasso from 1932 entitled "The Dream", only to hit his...
One beautiful, sunny, late-summer morning, I arrived at the chic, minimalist New York studio of Marina Abramovic (her neighbours in the building include, among others, Cindy Sherman) located round the back of the Meat Packing district. The large loft was bustling with...
Every two years, Istanbul is the destination for one of September’s major contemporary art events. This year it’s Elmgreen & Dragset, the Berlin-based Scandinavian artists, who were chosen to fill the curator’s shoes at the event, which opens to the public on 16...
 The brilliance of certain artists lies in their ability to force you to really look at what they have to show. It’s true of German-born, London-based artist Wolfgang Tillmans (b. 1968). Slowly but surely he’s become one of the superstars of contemporary art, and...
In the '90s HBO aired ‘Dream On’, a US series where the lead character at key moments had flashbacks of clips from TV shows he’d watched in his childhood. It was a way of saying that all adults born since the '60s are TV babies, shaped by its images, its theme tunes,...
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’...
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...
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,...
This is the tale of an artist who for ten years has been very secretly working away on a repertoire of works that will reinvent his creation. This is the tale of Damien Hirst (born 1965), who is attempting a resurrection in Venice by way of a sprawling and...
Because in this early part of the 21st century, Marcel Duchamp (born in 1887) is the patron saint of contemporary art. All artistic practices poking fun at the world take the works of this facetious artist as a springboard (and Picabia's too). Every artist who...