These days, newish art can be priced between $10,000 and $25,000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1,200, they look at me like I’m a flesh-eating virus. 2.34K
Rumors sound of galleries asking artists for upsized art and more of it. I’ve heard of photographers asked to print larger to increase the wall power and salability of their work. Everything winds up set to maximum in order to feed the beast. 664
‘Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,’ the Whitney Museum’s 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it’ll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new. 646
Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included. 677
Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall. 2.34K
In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don’t know what we’re seeing, we overreact. 2.48K
Wolfgang Tillman’s stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art. 620
The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn’t want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to. 554
The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level. 714
The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere. 826
Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists. 727
To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of ‘disinterest’ strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting. 647
The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn. 629
