Sean Scully (born in 1945) cuts an imposing figure. Tall in stature, he moves slowly. His face is stern. He has thin lips. A shaved head. He could play the role of a bad guy in a film. He has a reputation for being difficult, but after spending a short time in his...
The next modern and contemporary art sales of the season will take place the week of the 12 November in New York. The programme features a large amount of expensive art, the most expensive of the last six months, being passed from one hand to another with creations...
“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 ultra-famous Japanese architect and winner of the Pritzker Prize , Tadao Ando (born in 1941) possesses an uncommon grace. He doesn’t display the usual rigidity during interviews. I met him last year and the man was all smiles, speaking to me at length about boxing...
Information has a resounding impact in the art market not when it addresses such notions as beauty, aesthetic renewal or visual research, but rather when it uses superlatives: it’s always the most expensive, the biggest, the most spectacular. In the race to extremes...
The museums with the richest collections of paintings always stage the most beautiful temporary exhibitions of Old Masters art. This is, quite simply, because these collections constitute a great currency of exchange. But it’s also because they naturally attract the...
Artists have an advantage over mere mortals in that the fruit of their torments can give rise to great works of art. They are able to express their contradictions and allow them to play out on canvas, creating a sort of tension that appeals to the viewer’s emotions....
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....