It can be difficult finding one’s way among all these biennales – the new tourist panaceas – flourishing across the planet. This rainy spring, for example, in Jutland in the middle of Denmark, separated by 80km and only a few weeks apart from each other, there is a...
It’s a vast continent containing an array of political and religious realities, unique histories and countless languages. That's Africa, a jigsaw of identities. Art critics, however, still have a tendency to use the catchall term ‘African art’. As if there was such...
‘It has to be said, there were a lot of young artists doing it for the money. In recent years, we’ve seen the market go into overdrive for these precocious talents. Artists between 25 and 28 whose works were selling for 50,000 to 100,000 euros and more. But the crisis...
‘The Thinker’, ‘The Kiss’... Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is a giant of sculpture whose most famous works have almost become clichés (on this idea of Rodin as a cliché, see the new work by Urs Fischer – a life-sized version of 'The Kiss' in Plasticine, as...
Jeff Koons (born 1955) is one of those artists who inspires fascination and revulsion in equal measure. On the occasion of his 2014 retrospective at the Pompidou Centre, I was astonished to find myself subjected to vitriolic online attacks after I defended his show,...
Until 5 June, the Grand Palais in Paris has a lavishly produced exhibition featuring 278 extraordinary treasures belonging to Sheikh Hamad Bin Abdullah Al Thani, son of a former Qatari prime minister and cousin of the current Emir. In France, this family is also known...
This is the tale of an artist who for ten years has been very secretly working away on a repertoire of works that will reinvent his creation. This is the tale of Damien Hirst (born 1965), who is attempting a resurrection in Venice by way of a sprawling and...
Because in this early part of the 21st century, Marcel Duchamp (born in 1887) is the patron saint of contemporary art. All artistic practices poking fun at the world take the works of this facetious artist as a springboard (and Picabia's too). Every artist who...
Who among us hasn’t felt at least once, while walking by the sea, through a forest, or in the mountains, a kind of mystical impression, a communion with the sky and the earth, a sensation of being drawn towards the sublime absolute. To relive that experience, but...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJC9wbiKeV8 You can’t mistake her. She is coiffed like a contemporary Capuchin monk with her two-tone haircut, white at the roots, burgundy at the tips. She walks slowly but her spirit fizzes like lightning. Agnes Varda is...
‘Asia’s Precarious Rise’ was the headline the Wall Street Journal ran across its front cover not long ago (1). In fact, the eyes of the world are turned towards the great Chinese Leviathan to see whether this boom is not in fact a mirage, none more so than the art...
In Paris, a stone’s throw from the Boulevard Saint Germain, an exceptional new show has just opened that looks into the creative process behind Dutch masterpieces of 17th century. It involved a police-like investigation of history to locate the drawings that helped to...