In a world region torn by terrible conflicts, a small oasis is betting on the art market in a striking manner. In Dubai, the United Arab Emirates’ epicenter of tourism and banking, Alserkal Avenue is a 46,500 square-meter (500,521 square-foot) area in a former marble...
There are a few of this type in the world, very few, who devote part of their obviously substantial assets to contemporary art. Women of a rather warrior type who are independent and, above all, motivated by a precise vision. In France, Maja Hoffman comes to mind: The...
Anselm Kiefer was born in Germany in March 1945, and he will never get over it. His entire oeuvre is steeped in the idea of war, ruin and violence, combined in clever doses with literature that ranges from Rimbaud to the Kabbalah. When he was a kid, Anselm Kiefer...
How do you recognize a true artist? He creates an entire universe that is unique and powerful. He dreams and turns his dreams into tangible objects that make you dream. Among the abundant projects of uneven quality realized on the occasion of Paris’s COP21 climate...
Arriving in Beirut always makes a big impression. You’re told the road to the airport is dangerous because it’s the path along which Hezbollah settled. My driver discretely crosses himself before taking the wheel. A bad omen? Farther on, just outside a tunnel, a suite...
He came up onto the international art scene just a few years ago, but Danh Vo is already one of the stars of the globalized art scene, visible everywhere from New York’s Whitney Biennial to a retrospective at Mexico’s Jumex Museum to, in 2013, one at Paris’s Musée...
What is it that drives collectors to accumulate works of art, to get into debt, to travel around the world to see the works of their protégés and, sometimes, to eventually present the fruits of their labors to the public’s gaze? Back in 2008, I published Global...
In December 1915, something major happened in Saint Petersburg, which was then called Petrograd—a small revolution that would disrupt the course of art history all the way through to the 21st century. People have tended to forget these events, simply because Russia...
The first name to be exhibited in a major way at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is Danish artist Olafur Eliasson. Following are the demands and visions of this star of sensation-filled art on the occasion of a visit to his Berlin workshop. His name sounds...
It was a 73,000-cubic-meter (2,578-cubic-foot) blood-red belly—the original matrix—and you could enter it. Those who were in Paris in spring 2011 haven’t forgotten the crimson resin membrane that occupied the entire nave of the Grand Palais for during Monumenta. The...
In the vulgar trend that seeks to undermine art’s credibility and make a media scandal of any public installation on French soil, the last of the trend’s all-too-frequent episodes is called Anish Kapoor. This week, I couldn’t meet one person and talk about the suite...
The shock of art in London right now is to be found in an exhibition devoted to the lest well-known aspect of Pop art. When visiting museums around the world, you soon become aware of the fact that at the end of the 1960s, from around the globe and under all kinds of...