A Sky filled with Shooting Stars

If there’s a less polite exhibit than Paul McCarthy’s White Snow in New York presently, I certainly haven’t seen it.
Pretty much throughout his entire artistic career – certainly since I first saw him perform in England in 1983 – Mr McCarthy has trained his artistic focus on the more disgusting aspects of the human condition: [...]

A weather front passes over low hills and a broken row of small houses; the sky darkens; and, just as the storm is about to break, a bizarre and terrifying sight unfolds before our eyes. A wild bear, one of the proudest and most feared creatures that comes into more or less regular contact with [...]

 
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 [...]

 
 
You don’t go to the AIPAD photography fair for surprises, usually. The Association of International Photography Art Dealers, currently celebrating its 3oth anniversary, is a membership organization that represents most of the blue-chippers in this particular branch of the art dealers’ world. They call themselves “the world’s leading fine art photography galleries,” and have set themselves [...]

 
A Sky filled with Shooting Stars concerns itself primarily with New York’s contemporary art scene but, as any fool knows, without an appreciation of art’s histories, any sense of contemporary significance is going to be entirely unhinged. Imagine my recent conversation with Larry Poons if he hadn’t been able to refer to Mondrian, or last [...]

Bridge New York was one of last year’s big surprises. As I had only known it as a Miami hotel fair, it was real treat to find it entirely transformed in the Waterfront tunnel that runs between 11th and 12th Avenues in distant Chelsea. This time around there’s not that same sense of discovery, and [...]

 
 
For the second year running PULSE have come up with a quite splendid fair on Pier 40. Thought-provoking, entertaining, wide-ranging, and even surprising, these are all words that I would happily apply to the art down there, and what is more, there is a fantastic atmosphere at the fair, which I put down to gallerists [...]

 
While most people with an invitation or a press card headed for Armory Show’s west side piers today, I did my slightly eccentric thing by checking out the SCOPE tent at the back of Lincoln Center. I wasn’t disappointed, as you can read in my ARTINFO round-up. SCOPE isn’t the biggest fair, but it’s still [...]

I know we’re all meant to be focused on the fairs this week, but none of them have opened yet, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to recommend the wonderful show of photographs by Corey Arnold at Sara Tecchia. On the one hand there’s so much that seems topical about the making of [...]

 
Having the Works on Paper fair take place right on the eve of the busiest few days of the New York art fair calendar seems particularly odd this year. Even the show’s promoter, Sanford Smith, has told anyone who’ll listen that this is not a good time for art dealers: “Dozens of our exhibitors tell [...]