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...
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...
In the big market for new names that the small contemporary art world spends much of its time oohing and aahing about before quickly forgetting again, there are nonetheless those sincere individuals who often know not what to make of an artist through lack of...
He’s an arch-narcissist, his teeth are falling out, he’s unattractive, provocative, intelligent, cynical, disabused and expresses himself spiritedly with his lapidary pronouncements. Michel Houellebecq, the runaway success of the French publishing world, a writer who...
There once was a Swiss businessman who became the world’s biggest collector of Chinese art before giving almost all of it away to a Hong Kong museum... This is the remarkable story of Uli Sigg, the famous art world personality, as told in a new documentary by German...
On paper it was the best news from the European art world this season. Tate Modern, the epicentre of modern and contemporary art in Britain, is tightening its grip by adding 60% more exhibition space in a new extension designed – like the original gallery, which...
'Basel is the Wimbledon of art. It’s the fair where you find the highest quality in the world and where the most sophisticated collectors make an appearance. Even those further down players (galleries) in the rankings are happy to be included in the credits.’ Chris...