Alias Arts

America has a new President-elect. Yesterday’s vote was not only a political event, but a cultural one. It ushers in a generational shift in American leadership as well as a deeper realignment in ideology and outlook that seems to happen every 30-40 years here. The mood and texture of the …

Sarah Thornton’s book Seven Days in the Art World, which documents the frenzied peak of the recent art boom, arrives next week in American bookstores, just as that boom appears to be sputtering out. Some would call this bad timing. In fact, it’s a stroke of good luck. It puts …

Much art of the 1990s will forever remain associated with Nicolas Bourriaud’s exhibition Traffic (1995) and the book it spurred him to write, Relational Aesthetics (1998), which put forward the terms of art we now use to identify (describe?) the offerings of artists such as Liam Gillick, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Dominique …

Bloomberg today reported the dramatic drop in prices achieved at all the major auction houses this weekend.
Sales by Sotheby’s, Christie’s International and Phillips de Pury & Co made a combined 59 million pounds ($102 million), against minimum estimates of 106.2 million pounds, according to Bloomberg calculations. They follow a five-day …

The art world’s love affair with Russian money continues. After Roman Abramovich snapped up works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon, he then shipped half of London’s arterati to the opening of his girlfriend Dasha Zhukova’s CCC Garage in Moscow. Now auction house Phillips de Pury & Co have been …