https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj_FQj_faHw Imagine a world where the most popular slogan among young people is “peace and love”, a world where chemically induced paradises are the norm, where the orderly and materialist virtues of the capitalist middle...
Jackson Pollock, Napoleon, Hirohito, Marie Antoinette, Oscar Wilde, Adam Smith, Malcolm X, Amadeus Mozart, Albert Einstein, Sir Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vincent Van Gogh, Michelangelo, Sigmund Freud, four twelfth-century popes, Andy Warhol, and many...
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...
If there is an ultimate narcissistic being, it is surely the artist. Yet when the artist turns to evoking his fellow artists’ work, provided that it consumes him with passion, it becomes exceptional. Currently showing in Antwerp at the MHKA, the city’s museum of...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkclGz3JOgc Bruce Nauman is a towering figure in the art world but Bruce Nauman is also a mystery, for he is a complex artist. From 21 October, Moma in New York is dedicating its entire sixth floor as well as its PS1...
It is altogether highly unlikely. 660 km from Paris, deep in the heart of Aveyron in the South of France, there’s a town that cannot be accessed by motorway or by the TGV – neither of them travel through here – where you can visit the most substantial exhibition in...
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,...
It’s a revelation. The Musée d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris is presenting an exceptional exhibition dedicated to the large-scale works (up to 6 metres in length) of the painter Zao Wou-Ki, a practice he started in the 1950s. Born in China in 1920, he died in Paris...
Curiously, in an age like our own marked by creative profusion and profound upheavals, one of the strong tendencies when it comes to art consists of looking to the past to rediscover artists who might have been unjustly forgotten. This is the case for Gordon...
The South African photographer David Goldblatt, born in 1930, died on 25 June. I met this exceptional man at his home in Johannesburgh. He was both humble and humanistic, and had long been involved in the fight against apartheid and racism in his country. Then I...
I am the curator of an exhibition dedicated to Ai Weiwei in Marseille, Ai Weiwei.Fan Tan at the spectacular museum designed by Rudy Ricciotti on the shores of the Mediterranean, the Mucem, which opened this week. Since the purpose of this blog is to communicate my...