A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

 
For a lot of people, the new Rizzoli book about Kenny Scharf will seem a perfect match for his artistic personality: it’s big, it’s brash, it’s brightly colored, and it’s got a big-nosed, one-eyed cartoon character grinning out from the middle of it. 
Rarely can an artist have been so inextricably linked with a particular time [...]

   
Many years ago, back in the early 1980s, I used to write for a little British art magazine called Artscribe. We published in black and white, scraping by from issue to issue, but we were an earnest little group who felt that our opinions might actually shape the future of contemporary painting. Of course that [...]

Earlier today ARTINFO and The New York Times broke the story that Hauser & Wirth – Flash Art’s “top international gallery” in Europe – is to open a gallery in New York this September. During the summer they will be converting their building at 32 East 69th Street (which is currently home to the secondary [...]

 
I had quipped to friends before attending this year’s New York Affordable Art Fair that I doubted whether I would find anything that was coincidentally affordable and desirable. I am big enough to admit that I was wrong. 
In its new accommodation at 7 West 34th Street – the same place that has recently housed both [...]

 
I knew that declaring my exhibition of the year as early as February would come back and bite me in the ass. It is only the fact that the twin shows, “Claes Oldenburg: Early Sculpture, Drawings, and Happenings Films” and “Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen: The Music Room” are so much smaller than “The [...]

 
For a long time I have had a real enthusiasm for April Gornik’s painting, and not only because she was the subject of the very first interview that Barbara MacAdam asked me to do for ARTINFO in 2005. There is an unwritten rule over at ARTINFO that artists don’t get interviewed more than once, and [...]

 
 
Anyone who knows the what’s what in performance art acknowledges Tehching Hsieh as one of the great defining artists of the discipline. Having arrived here as an illegal immigrant from Taiwan in 1974, he made a series of five quite unbelievable year-long performances between 1978 and 1986, at least four of which were almost incomprehensibly difficult. [...]

You remember the Andy Warhol “Giant” Size book that Phaidon published in 2006? An extraordinary and utterly covetable book, it sells for $125 full-price (though Amazon have sellers offering at less than $75), weighs in at more than seventeen pounds, and measures more than seventeen inches by thirteen. In other words, although it’s a real [...]

 
 
When I looked forward at the beginning of the year to “The Generational: Younger than Jesus”, the New Museum’s first edition of its international triennial, I said I was hoping for “some spectacularly hit-and-miss controversy”. Now that I’ve seen the show I can confirm that the work it includes ranges from the not-quite-sublime to the utterly-ridiculous. Perhaps that’s [...]

 
 
I have written here several times about how highly I rate the Guggenheim’s current show “The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860–1989”.  I have called it “Exhibition of the Year!” and celebrated its “trust in the chance gesture and the unconsidered act … which for someone of my sensibilities is an utter delight.” But [...]