14 July 2021 All his life Christian Boltanski was obsessed by death. At his final large-scale exhibition, a retrospective conceived as a single artwork in 2019 at the Centre Pompidou, with its premonitory title “Faire son temps” (“Life in the making”), he spoke...
https://youtu.be/6MAhlc0J7Uc Not the architecture Biennale No, it wasn’t the architecture biennale that made me rush to Venice. I initially found it intellectually stimulating, with all the societal and ecological questions it...
Stephan Zweig “It was a doll’s house, this Little Trianon (…) This ‘Anglo-Chinese garden’ was to represent, not merely nature, but the whole of nature. In the microcosm of a few square kilometers, there was to be a quasi-microscopic...
A lineage of collectors The Swiss billionaire Maja Hoffmann comes from a lineage of remarkable collectors. Her grandmother, Maja Sacher, was one of the founders of the art museum in Basel (See here the video interview of Maja Hoffmann)...
https://youtu.be/B4sqjQECVgk Great painter It’s generally taken as a given that Gerhard Richter is one of the great painters from the latter half of the 20th century. But for anyone who may still have doubts on the subject, it’s worth...
Heritage of the traumas https://youtu.be/okH5n9CZbx0 For some time now colonialism, slavery and the heritage of these traumas has been at the centre of an unusual kind of attention, giving rise to what was once called “history painting” up...
https://youtu.be/ELj2brIz4OA An Irishman and an American dandy Take an American dandy who liked women, wild animals and photography. Then take another dandy, an Irishman who loved men and made paintings depicting torment and suffering with...
Emerging from the crisis New York is emerging from the public health crisis. And the art market is following suit. At a time when those who had been vaccinated were permitted to walk around without masks in the United States, the Frieze...
https://youtu.be/Zn9YIvr9p5I A poor rural family What more is there to aspire to when you’re an 84-year-old billionaire who was born into a poor rural family in a Breton village? The answer lies in the district of Les Halles in Paris...
https://youtu.be/OxTr5dkWJNE His Sainte Victoire During a public health crisis, the Beyeler Foundation could have contented itself with displaying its Rothkos, Monets, Giacomettis… from the permanent collection amassed by its founder, the...
No foreigners No foreign visitors, or only very few… Frieze New York, the first fair to effectively take place on American soil since the outbreak of the pandemic, is receiving very few - if any - foreign visitors between 5 and 9 May 2021. The...
https://youtu.be/-pI4A56LDfI Neologism Messenger RNA, mutated virus, comorbidity, NFTs, blockchain, quantum theory, big data... The world in 2021 is filled – along with our heads – with an assortment of new words which, prior to the public...