"Technology is both the remedy and the poison," artist Cao Fei quotes Bernard Stiegler, emphasizing the complex relationship between technological advancements and their impact on human practices.
Art UK has taken it as its mission to digitally unite one million artworks from 3,500 institutions. This free-to-all portal connects everyone with the UK's public art collections.
"It's a really special spot. When you start at the top and move down the gently sloped ramp, you almost feel like a marble tumbling down, looking at art as you roll by. The slight slant plays with your sense of perspective and grounding."
The dream is the confusion machine I didn't have to build, a space where perception slips beyond authorship. Within Communal Dreams, influence operates as a subtle signal rather than a directive force.
In both places, there was a sense of energy building that was not yet fully visible. The experiences made me realize that, while sales totals and fair brands can serve as benchmarks of centrality, slower, structural transformations are taking place throughout Asia that merit closer attention.
Kamrooz Aram is everywhere this year, from Mumbai Art Week to the Whitney Biennial, and critic Aruna D'Souza is grateful. She pens a beautiful meditation on his work, reading his abstract paintings as not simply a denunciation of Western modernism nor a reassertion of Islamic visual motifs, but something else entirely - something gestural, exuberant, riotous, and incomparably his own.
Hong Kong's particular and seductive Metabolist city planning is an ode to consumption as a great totalizer of culture, and to contemporary art as merely a niche commodity form among many others.
The record price in the category, $13.8m- paid last year at Christies' in New York for a painting by the Mumbai-based Modernist M.F. Husain-is more than three times what it was 20 years ago.
Dealers like artists with established sales records because it lowers their already considerable financial exposure. Renting a gallery space in Tribeca costs anywhere between $8,000-30,000 a month on top of staff, marketing, and daily operations. With that kind of overhead, very few business owners can afford to take on the financial risk of untested artists.
On Franklin Street in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, one non-commercial gallery fosters 'a small, stubbornly human space for friction.' Friction—the ubiquitous buzzword that captures the simultaneous delight and discomfort of doing things the slow way—is at the heart of artists Pap Souleye Fall and Char Jeré's current show at Subtitled NYC. It also reflects the overall spirit of this little exhibition space and of a burgeoning movement to reject our culture of optimization in favor of a bumpier, more intimate, less alienating experience.
Stephen Friedman was overdue filing when he went into liquidation on 2 February, closing his London gallery immediately (his New York venue shuttered around the same date). At the time of writing, invoices remain unpaid and artists unable to retrieve works from storage companies. In a statement, Friedman says 'all matters are now subject to the administrator's consideration'.