There is one school of contemporary art, going back to Marcel Duchamp, that involves playing pranks and ridiculing everything encountered in this absurd world of ours. You could be led to believe, on first appearances, that Scandinavian artists Elmgreen and Dragset,...
In this cynical and individualistic world we live in, acts of generosity always cause surprise. The gift in question is worth 6 million euros according to insurers. It came into existence last year when the Potanin Foundation, belonging to Russian oligarch Vladimir...
At the turn of the 20th century, with Europe about to be shaken by a world war and a revolution, the world of painting was also in a state of extreme turmoil. The objective was to destroy the old order. In Paris, then global epicentre of the avant-garde, but also...
What does it mean to be a political artist in this day and age? I can already see readers deliberating whether to close their screens… But don’t go anywhere, this won’t be boring. The most high profile political artist working today is Ai Weiwei. He posts, tweets, and...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4INLxy-ztgI Once upon a time, a country the size of a continent was slowly throwing off the shackles of authoritarianism. Citizens were beginning to travel abroad, accumulate possessions, launch new enterprises, and come...
Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is one of the most revered photographers of the modern age. Her appeal stems in large part from her rare ability to capture the uniqueness and even the pain in her subjects. A tense child gripping a toy grenade; a monstrous giant in the...
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...
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...