The skilled climber and thief Vjeran Tomic, whom the French press referred to as Spider-Man, has described robbery as an act of imagination. He was driven partly by aesthetic desire. “Certain paintings can provoke me like an emotional shock,” he said.
While photography was central to Warhol’s artistic practice for 30 years, often as source material for his famous screen prints, his purely photographic works — in particular, his stitched gelatin prints of a single image printed multiple times and sewn together — only saw the light of day once while he was alive.
As art institutions continue to raise ticket prices and roll out blockbusters, we may come to see shows that will be curated entirely by optimized algorithms. What happens when a museum becomes curator-less? Will this be the end of art history as we’ve known it, or the dawn of a techno renaissance?
“There has been no architecture of a similar vigour in the last 100 years. It is based strictly on codes, algorithms, technologies, engineering and performance, not intention. Its boredom is hypnotic, its banality breathtaking.” For Koolhaas, the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center embodies a new kind of sublime.
Thieves stole an 1884 oil painting by Vincent van Gogh called “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” from the Singer Laren art museum near Amsterdam. What do the criminals do with a stolen painting, and how could they get caught?
Hagia Sophia has been the ‘apple of discord’ between the Greeks and the Turks, the ‘east’ and the ‘west’ for 567 years, but as history likes to repeat itself we are now witnessing a revival of this old dispute. A museum has been converted to a mosque.
Ficre Ghebreyesus had no art gallery representation during his lifetime. Now his widow is working with Galerie Lelong in New York to show the work that summed up his search for identity.
What do we mean when we call an artwork a masterpiece? Who gets to decide what becomes one? Who makes them? And is it still a constructive label to dole out when we talk about art? What Makes a Masterpiece?
What happened at the Gardner Museum has become the most famous art heist ever, not only because of the money involved—$500 million, making it the largest art theft in history—but also because of the countless FBI agents, private detectives and art dealers who’ve tried and failed to solve it.