By John Valentine
Wabi-Sabi is a classic and well-known style of Japanese craftsmanship dating back at least as far as the 14th century. Unfortunately, its definition has become a cliché in the art world and its deeper philosophical dimensions are often overlooked or under-appreciated. The standard explanation is superficial at best: “A beauty [...]
By Jon Seals
There are nights that are so still
that I can hear the small owl calling
far off and a fox barking
miles away. It is then that I lie
in the lean hours awake listening
to the swell born somewhere in
the Atlantic
rising and falling, rising and falling
wave on wave on the long shore
by the village [...]
By Paco Barragán
Like Charles Dickens’ famous novel A Tale of Two Cities, the history of the contemporary art fair of the 1970s and 1980s can be explained by the extraordinary rivalry between Cologne and Basel. I will try to formulate here why ART COLOGNE, though being the first contemporary art fair, [...]
By Jason Hoelscher
Technologies become socially interesting only when they become technologically boring, to paraphrase NYU new media professor Clay Shirky. That is, people marvel at a new gadget when it debuts, because its rarity causes it to stand out. At that point it is technologically interesting but socially dull. It is only [...]
By Craig Drennen
Mid-December every year I convene with familiar art world veterans to hear about their favorite pieces from the Miami art fairs. And every year I’m told that the best thing seen was an obscure Picabia, a forgotten Fontana, or a newly available Alice Neel. In other words, within the froth [...]
By Kendall Buster and Paula Crawford
The word critique (and the related words critic, criticism, critical, criterion) all come down to us from a family of words in Greek that refer to judging, distinguishing, and selecting. And true to its own etymology, the critique is a place of reckoning, where an artwork in [...]
Given the dynamic nature of the technologically driven and culturally amalgamated world today, the ‘look’ of our hyper-connected virtual image landscape has reached a new level of visuality. Artists around the globe are exploding the canon and exploring novel possibilities of aesthetic incarnation.
Among her peers working in the digital realm, Lu Yang’s (born 1984, Shanghai, [...]
By Michele Robecchi
Happy Birthday “Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Forms”. It was March 1969 when the exhibition organized by Harald Szeemann opened at the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, crossing the proverbial point of no return or, to deploy a rather abused expression, instigating a paradigm shift that 50 years later [...]
By Paco Barragán
The 20th century knows basically three typologies of art fairs: modern, contemporary and global. The Armory Show represents the modern, or “artist-frame-to-frame,” art fair: organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors in 1913 in New York, it represented 1,300 works hanged frame-to-frame on the walls in 18 partitioned spaces, [...]
An American post-conceptual artist, writer and theorist, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Berlin, Warren Neidich has been exploring scientific and philosophical ideas in his art for the past 30 years. Widely published and exhibited Neidich works in a variety of media-from photography, video and painting to Internet downloads, noise installations [...]
