“Lacquerware is light and soft to the touch and gives off hardly a sound. I know few greater pleasures than holding a lacquer soup bowl in my hands, feeling upon my palms the weight of the liquid and its mild warmth. The sensation is something like that of holding a...
The day I understood the contemporary art market (the market as opposed to the art itself) was the day I realized that everything in this industry is a question of confidence. The art market isn’t about justice for art nor art history. In an age when virtuosity and...
There are two trends currently shaping the art market. The first is the presence of an art with some kind of political dimension, be it environmental awareness, feminism, or a problematic American presidency... The second is that galleries are having trouble selling...
The Japanese businessman Yusaku Maezawa (born in 1975), the eighteenth richest man in Japan according to Forbes, founder of Japan's largest online fashion mall, Zozotown, became an overnight celebrity in May 2017 when he announced that he’d purchased an enormous...
The Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris is staging an exhibition dedicated to Jean Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the hero of contemporary American painting, comprising 120 works that are emblematic of the artist. The ensemble of paintings and drawings presented here,...
The American businessman Mitchell Rales (born in 1956) can’t be said to be wanting for money. Forbes values the wealth of this man, who started out in real estate in 1983, at 3.5 billion dollars and ranks him 652nd in their list of the world’s richest people in 2018....
It has become customary in the world of politics (with one glaring exception) for voters to elect leaders who are reasonably good looking, comfortable in their own skin, and well dressed. France has recently provided us with such an example. Michael Govan (born in...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLpiHClll00 “I am Madame Bovary”. These vague words are attributed to Gustave Flaubert, but they do express a truth of paramount importance in terms of creativity. The raw material for artists is the artists...
When we were little, one of the most exciting activities proposed to us during summer camps or as one of our extracurricular activities was to go on a treasure hunt. These days, the only kinds of treasure hunt on offer to us poor adults with boring schedules are...
You won’t escape Van Gogh in Arles. While he has indeed been buried since 1890 in Auvers-sur-Oise, he has never been so present in the Camargue city where he stayed for little over a year. Never mind the sunflowers growing in the surrounding fields, as though designed...
There’s nothing “politically correct” about this exhibition. Here the women often tend to be nude, they smoke, and they pursue their own pleasure. And it’s an American painter-voyeur by the name of Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) who portrays, against a seaside background,...
She told me: “If I were you I would think twice before you decide to go to Tehran. The Grand Bazaar is on strike. The last time that happened the Shah was overthrown”. She’s an American-Iranian friend who receives daily news from Tehran via her family who live in the...