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.
4 July 2014 • daniel barnes
The saleroom was electric. Not like it’s got a family full of eccentrics, but like important things were about to happen.
27 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The result is that contemporary art is a myth without a foundation, a copy without an original, a market commodity that is an abstraction at heart.
20 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The Tate has this week received its most valuable and exciting bequest in quite some years: Sir Nicholas Serota announced a donation of three stunning paintings from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly.
13 June 2014 • daniel barnes
This immanent and inevitable catastrophe is a lesson in how the unchecked might of the market renders impotent the museums whose mandate is to preserve our rich cultural history.
6 June 2014 • daniel barnes
The phenomenon of Basquiat’s prices and the more general taste for street art of which it is symptomatic is a product of the art market’s ability to disseminate otherwise obscure art and to launch it into the establishment.
2 June 2014 • daniel barnes
On the evening of 15th September 2008 three completely unrelated events occurred, which determined this precise moment in time. This is the story of how art survived recession in spectacular fashion and how a philosopher, an artist and a bank unwittingly crossed paths.
23 May 2014 • daniel barnes
The art bubble continues to inflate, enjoying an absence of natural predators and external regulation.
16 May 2014 • daniel barnes
It is often said, quite casually, that a work of art is priceless.
9 May 2014 • daniel barnes
This strategy, however, can backfire if it makes contemporary art seem too stern or obscure for a wider audience to grasp. And there is a very real fear that that has happened this year.
2 May 2014 • daniel barnes
A crisis of ownership and authenticity has erupted over the sale of seven Banksy murals which were removed from the streets of London by a cowboy art dealership called Stealing Banksy?
25 April 2014 • daniel barnes
Culture has a selective memory because it diminishes the thrill of the Now
18 April 2014 • daniel barnes
The recent announcement of the UK’s top ten most expensive living artists offers a sobering opportunity to think about the extent to which contemporary art has been infected by its entanglement with money.
11 April 2014 • daniel barnes
The price of art is a much discussed and much maligned phenomenon. But whilst there may sometimes be good grounds for suspicion, a lot of what we hear about the price of art is a wilful fantasy of the media, fuelled by a perennially disingenuous market.
4 April 2014 • daniel barnes
Imagine a millionaire who lives on a diet of boiled eggs and iced coffee. He is an altruist and a patron, he is a tyrant and a menace. Imagine that he made the careers of today’s top artists,
28 March 2014 • daniel barnes
The newest star to twinkle in the infernal blackness that traverses the space between economics and culture is Eddie Peake.
21 March 2014 • daniel barnes
There is a new generation of artists who are realising staggeringly high prices. This group of rising stars is an all boys club of young, middle-class men. It is a perfect demonstration of the perennial confusion between price and quality, where buyers’ voracious habits steer the consensus towards judgments of artistic worth. But the market, in its inexorable whim, is not always right.
14 March 2014 • daniel barnes
The relationship between art and money is complex because it is necessary to the very existence of art in capitalist society, at the same time as being a threat to the integrity of art.
7 March 2014 • daniel barnes
It is worth remembering that whether it is selling exhibition tickets or paintings or even making lucrative sponsorship deals, man cannot live by art alone and that capital rules art just as it does everything else.
28 February 2014 • daniel barnes
They are cultural farmers markets, celebrity hotspots, arenas of business, a capricious day out or a site of curious innovation.
