9 January 2015 • daniel barnes
A spectre is haunting the artworld. In the foyer of Christie’s New York, at over twelve feet tall and made of painted steel, Jeff Koons’ Balloon Monkey (Orange) (2006-2013) presides over daily business.
1 January 2015 • daniel barnes
In order to combat this, contemporary art has developed jargon that purports to explain every nuance of the artworld, but it often only deepens the mystery.
23 December 2014 • daniel barnes
A Year of art in review
19 December 2014 • daniel barnes
Poju Zabludowicz, along with his wife Anita, runs the Zabludowicz Foundation, which supports young artists. By all accounts, they are gregarious, educated, good-hearted people who passionately support the arts because they are able to, so one wonders why they have become the subject of a boycott.
12 December 2014 • daniel barnes
James Franco is everywhere, doing everything, all the time. He is an actor, writer, musician, English Literature student, teacher, director and world war agitator. Now, like everyone else in Hollywood, he is an artist, but one who exposes the heartbreaking sycophancy and emptiness of the artworld.
5 December 2014 • daniel barnes
Ever since video killed the radio star, it has acted with impunity. Its latest crime has been to gorge on the Turner Prize.
28 November 2014 • daniel barnes
Ever since Tracey Emin said that it is impossible for a woman to have children and be a great artist, female artists have received attention in the male-dominated artworld.
21 November 2014 • daniel barnes
The Winter Pride Art Awards celebrated its second year last Saturday with a ceremony at Tobacco Dock. It was a glittering event, with wild entertainment, fine food and fine art, not to mention plenty of cocktails. Behind the glamorous veneer of an awards ceremony to celebrate young, emerging artists, Winter Pride has a serious and urgent mission which is so often overlooked in the wider artworld
14 November 2014 • daniel barnes
It all started when Snoop was staying at the Palazzo Versace hotel, where a Versace cushion was the inspiration for a painting that would later sell on eBay for $10,200.
6 November 2014 • daniel barnes
Sotheby’s has been sued over the misattribution of a painting which experts now say is a genuine Caravaggio
24 October 2014 • daniel barnes
In November 2011, Jerry Saltz announced on his Facebook page that he would pay anyone $155 to make him a fake Richter, Ryman, Flavin, Fontana, Duchamp, Hirst, Guyton, or Agnes Martin.
10 October 2014 • daniel barnes
Standing before Tracey Emin’s tiny new paintings in the vast galleries of White Cube Bermondsey, the entire reason for art’s existence unfurls: every line is a snatch of emotion, every drip a careful meditation, equal parts memory and fantasy, brought from artist to audience in an act of pure communication.
2 October 2014 • daniel barnes
A few years ago, I wrote that Creed’s Turner Prize winning Work No. 227 The lights going on and off (2001) was the first great artwork of the twenty-first century.
29 September 2014 • daniel barnes
Anselm Kiefer wants to turn Switzerland into a maritime nation.
22 September 2014 • daniel barnes
Miley Cyrus says her goal in life is ‘to not die a pop pop dumb dumb’.
12 September 2014 • daniel barnes
As autumn descends on London, the artworld is gearing up for the great tragic-comic circus of consumption and gossip that is Frieze Art Fair.
5 September 2014 • daniel barnes
In a town whose faded seaside glamour is both complimented and disturbed by a swath of public art, it is only at low tide that the feverish digging can commence.
29 August 2014 • daniel barnes
One of the most important interventions in art history is built upon a myth.
22 August 2014 • daniel barnes
If Damien Hirst did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. In the late 1980s, the London artworld, flooded with Koons, Kiefer and Schnabel, needed a glittering new star.
15 August 2014 • daniel barnes
The Jeff Koons retrospective, currently on show at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, demonstrates the terrifying power of an art superstar who can secure the impunity to make a lot of terrible work on the basis of a few great pieces.
8 August 2014 • daniel barnes
Jake and Dinos Chapman are nearing the end of a crowdfunding campaign for an exhibition in their hometown of Hastings.
1 August 2014 • daniel barnes
The idea that commercial galleries do not sell to just anyone, but select their clients very carefully, sounds like outright elitism. It sounds as if they deliberately seek out the rich and powerful….
25 July 2014 • daniel barnes
Damien Hirst has commanded the destruction of an early Spot Painting……
18 July 2014 • daniel barnes
Two people, one artist, making art for all in their tweed suits, dining every day in the same restaurant because they don’t have a kitchen, with no friends and traditional Conservative values.
