Eavesdropping isn’t the noblest action to fess up to. Though when at an event like Art Basel Miami Beach, where many of the local and international gentry are happy enough to sound in-the-know, and opinions fly from every cardinal direction, I’ll take the risk of stepping into a moral grey area. Just call it a…
On view in Saatchi’s Prints & Originals Gallery for another month, Revolutions Per Minute is a celebration of street art as it has evolved in the recent past and a showcase for the considerable, diverse talent evident today. The exhibition is also an acknowledgement of the debt owed to movements that came before; in particular, the musical…
Art has a familiar way of excusing itself from conversation with the untrained eye to speak straight to the soul. Feelings stirred up by masterpieces can be much more poignant than facts known about them. Though, as many a connoisseur might agree, a bit of expertise can enhance aesthetic enjoyment a great deal. Hard to believe, but…
China, Yunnan, Yuanyang Just a moment. The one when the light marries the rice fields, the one when the drowned terraces shine…the water can sing in the canals and flow from the heights of Yuanyang. The ‘Valley of the Purple Clouds’ opens a panorama where the sensual curves of the terraces delicately intertwine the hillsides.…
BY MITCHELL COOPER / What’d you write your dissertation on? Stephen Hawking’s reply would involve a rightly smug remark about the underpinnings of all existence. Using Einstein’s theory of relativity as a baseline, he proved as a young doctoral candidate that the universe really did have a concrete beginning. And the Big Bang has haunted…
It wasn’t the hippies who first passed down the adage ‘make love not war’; it was the ancient Greeks, all the way back in 411 BCE. That’s when Aristophanes’ drama Lysistrata was first performed in Athens, one of the earliest battles of the sexes played out on a Western stage. Power struggles between men from Mars and…
BY EMILY CATRICE / As our friends on the Thanksgiving-celebrating side of the pond sidle in at the sides of symbolically-loaded tables, let’s take a moment to reflect on the dictates of one forward-thinking man who decried traditional ways of wining and dining. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti penned La Cucina Italiana in 1932. A half-joking cookbook for…
Nowadays, Barcelona is teeming with young creative talents. Probably one of the most original among the many is artist and illustrator Sergio Mora (@sergio.mora.art). Novel, bright, playful and a little cryptic, his work will no doubt stick firmly in the back of your mind from first glance. In addition to completing wonderfully illustrated children’s books and collaborating with…
Here’s the story of a modern day, post-punk feminist art collective and Nadya Tolokonnikova’s tribulations as the founder of Pussy Riot, who stuck two fingers up at the Russian system and suffered the consequences. To mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, audiences are encouraged to pull on the balaclava and stand up for…
Even if money’s nothing but an abstract concept, $450.3 million is a whole lot of conceptual smackeroos. Even if that figure includes a buyer’s premium, $450.3 million is a nearly unfathomable sum to fork over for single work of art at auction. Even if that work of art is a legit da Vinci painting… The art world…