An untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat sold on May 15th for $110.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction. To which the only sensible response is – so what? Imagine for a moment that it was not a painting that had been purchased, but rather a yacht.
Each life has its story. Some are fairytales, some are nightmares. Post pictures & messages on Witness Your World, to turn them into artworks. Profits of sold artworks go to projects aiming to improve the world.
Art Art is good; self-expression is great. What it isn’t is a substitute for political action to transform the world and challenge power. Art is a very good way of distilling and describing the world and the mood of a time. Some of the painters
Even a show-off like me finds this new, super-rich art-buying crowd vulgar and depressingly shallow Being an art buyer these days is comprehensively and indisputably vulgar. It is the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy, Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with
Forget about listening to ourselves. In the age of data, algorithms have the answer. For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people. Jean-Jacques Rousseau summed up this revolution
The dawning of a new year is always an occasion for reflection on one’s place in the world, and resolutions to do better in the coming cycle. This year, because of the uncannily hideous and destabilizing nature of 2016, these contemplations are a heavy lift
On a recent evening in San Francisco, Tristan Harris, a former product philosopher at Google, took a name tag from a man in pajamas called “Honey Bear” and wrote down his pseudonym for the night: “Presence.” Harris had just arrived at Unplug SF, a “digital
As the art industry undergoes its messy transition into the globalized digital era, a handful of self-styled change agents have emerged with visions of how to best leverage and guide this period of upheaval. None of them have been as polarizing as the art collector,
Gideon Lewis-Kraus is a writer at large for ‘the magazine’ NYT and a fellow at New America Prologue: You Are What You Have Read Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo,
Nick Couldry is Professor of Media, Communications and Social Theory, London School of Economics and Political Science. Imagine, if you can, a period long before today’s internet-based connectivity. Imagine that, in that distant time, the populations of every country were offered a new plan. The
Daiga Rudzāte spoke with German art collector Harald Falckenberg in Hamburg about art as a historical document and the relationship between freedom and collecting. Harald Falckenberg of Germany is looked upon as one of the most influential people in the world of international contemporary art
Stephen Mayes is often described as a “futurist” and broadcast, taught and written extensively about the ethics and practice of photography. In the future, there will be no such thing as a “straight photograph”. It’s time to stop talking about photography. It’s not that photography is
There are few in the art world that see more, write more, or speak to more artists than Serpentine Galleries co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist. And, having literally written the book on curating, there are few better positioned to see what shape art will take in
Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked Online. Identity politics and the death of the individual Nothing speaks more profoundly to the crisis of character than the phrase, ‘I identify as…’. In the past, individuals were. ‘I am a builder.’ ‘I am a mother.’ ‘I am
Antonio Masi does reasonably well as an artist, exhibiting and selling his paintings around the country, even abroad. If you had gone to the recent “American Masters” exhibition at New York’s Salmagundi Club (October 5-23), you would have seen three of the Garden City, Long
Adam Scheffer is president of the Art Dealers Association of America, and partner and sales director at Cheim & Read. It’s a fascinating time to run a gallery. More than ever it’s a time for us to innovate, to be extremely forward thinking and open-minded.
The climate science maverick believes catastrophe is inevitable, carbon offsetting is a joke and ethical living a scam. So what would he do? In 1965 executives at Shell wanted to know what the world would look like in the year 2000. They consulted a range
Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face, on battles with Steve Jobs and why we need to dismantle our techno-industrial society It has become something of a mantra within the sustainability movement that innovations in technology can save the world. But rather than liberating
What is the connection between Social Networks and Being Lonely? Quoting the words of Sherry Turkle from her TED talk – “Connected, But Alone”
A reportage of the exhibition “Witness Your World” in Milan during the World Expo 2015.
I’m happy to have success in painting, but it’s never been a goal. It happened by itself over a very long period of time and with some certain luck, and you can’t tell how much is fashion and how much is sustainable. People might say,
Without us noticing, we are entering the postcapitalist era. At the heart of further change to come is information technology, new ways of working and the sharing economy. The old ways will take a long while to disappear, but it’s time to be utopian The
Coming from the financial sector, where for years he has worked as an investment banker, the Brussels-based collector Alain Servais prides himself on taking a holistic view of the systems powering the global art industry, applying market models to predict future trends—and swoop in on
Is the iPhone a Blessing or a Curse for Art and Artists? by Ben Davis – Art Critic In 1951, Hans Namuth first published his photos of Jackson Pollock at work. They were meant as documents of the famed artist’s process. But all over the world,
Situating Post Internet by Domenico Quaranta I Writing about post-internet art from an art history perspective looks pretty much like an impossible task at present. Either we are still trapped in the storm of comments, opinions and debates that blew up when this proposed art
From The Book of Life from Alain de Botton’s School of Life At a recent Sotheby’s auction in London, Wall by the German painter Gerhard Richter eclipsed the already vast estimate given by the auction house, finally selling for a shade under 17.5 million GBP.
New Business Models for the Art Market with Jonathan T.D. Neil and Stefan Simchowitz An informational and comprehensive conversation focusing on the proliferation of the international art market and the role of new models in this expanded field. Art sales have traditionally passed through auction
A Collector Debunks Art as an Investment By Adam Lindemann The last several years have brought nosebleed prices for works of art, auction records that seem to be broken almost as soon as they are made. With endless media coverage of $100 million Picassos and $50
With images circulating more freely than ever, is it time for copyright legislation to be relaxed – or tightened? Apollo Magazine asked a range of senior figuresfor their perspectives on copyright now WIM PIJBES – GENERAL DIRECTOR, THE RIJKSMUSEUM The Rijksmuseum was the first cultural
Art reflects society. It is a witness of a certain era. Artists are responsible to capture this period of time and represent it through their art. The invention of perspective for instance, became the framework in which to visually represent nature and history in paintings
