There is a curious contradiction at the center of Ruth Asawa’s place in American art history: an artist who fundamentally altered the possibilities of sculpture has spent much of the postwar period sitting just outside the canonical narrative her innovations should have helped define. That narrative has largely been built around David Smith’s monumental ambitions, […]
This October, the Whitney Museum of American Art opens Roy Lichtenstein: Like New, a survey bringing together roughly 130 works spanning six decades, from student paintings of the early 1940s through the artist’s final canvases of the 1990s. Among its most anticipated moments is the reconstruction of Lichtenstein’s landmark 1962 debut at Leo Castelli Gallery […]
There is a moment, in almost every museum visit, when a velvet rope or a closed door reminds you that something important is happening just out of sight. For most of the history of conservation, that “something” was the cleaning, repair, and study of paintings — a discipline practiced in windowless basements by specialists who […]
When a Rothko Becomes More Than a Painting This spring, the market once again reminded the art world that Mark Rothko remains one of the defining figures of twentieth-century art. At Christie’s New York, No. 15 (Two Greens and Red Stripe) (1964), formerly owned by legendary patron and former Museum of Modern Art president emerita […]
A Gesture That Altered the Course of Sculpture When Alexander Calder casually remarked that it “would be fun” to set abstract art in motion, he articulated an intuition that would reverberate across the history of modern art. What reads as lightness of intent belies the magnitude of its consequence. In the charged atmosphere of early […]
From March 26 through April 4, audiences in Salt Lake City in the U.S. are invited into a poetic encounter between sound, light, and ecological awareness. In A Symphony of Disappearing Sounds for the Great Salt Lake, Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur Eliasson presents a large-scale nighttime installation in the wooded landscape of Memory Grove Park. Listening […]
International Women’s Day serves as a powerful reminder for the art world to look again — and look more carefully — at the women who altered its course. Few figures demand that reconsideration more forcefully than Artemisia Gentileschi. A master of the Italian Baroque whose career spanned Rome, Florence, Venice, Naples, and London, Artemisia transformed […]
In the last installment of ARTDEX’s Art and Money series, Why Art Valuation Is Never Just About Money – Art and Money Series Part 3, we challenge the idea that art valuation is simply about price. Moving beyond sticker shock and surface-level complexity, we reveal how art prices function as signals of confidence, trust, and […]
Series Recap: From Sticker Shock to Structural Reality In Part 1, Why Is Art So Expensive?, we examined the initial reaction many people have when encountering famous artists’ art prices — sticker shock, disbelief, and the assumption that prices are inflated or arbitrary. In Part 2, Why It’s Complicated, we moved beyond surface reactions to […]
There are moments in the life of museums when an exhibition does more than bring together a celebrated body of work; it shifts an axis. Wifredo Lam: When I Don’t Sleep, I Dream at the Museum of Modern Art reminds us that modernism was never a monolith — and that the imagination, when rooted in […]
In a dazzling Paris evening sale in October 2025, Yves Klein’s monumental California (IKB 71) (1961), a fourteen-foot expanse of pure ultramarine, sold for €18.4 million (about $21.4 million), the highest price ever paid for the artist in France. The work, created just a year before Klein’s untimely death, stands as both an apex of […]
