Not to sound like too much of a fogey, but there was a time when the art world abounded with publications devoted to art—Art in America, Studio International, Arts magazine, Artforum, Art News…

Is there still any distinction? It might have been a test of how our perceptions of the unclothed body in art have changed over the past four decades: Seven years ago, at the Museum of Modern Art, a young man and a young woman stood facing each other in a doorway,...

In the fall of 2018, Jamie Hamilton went looking for a place to dispose of scraps for compost in Los Angeles, his adopted home since moving from Santa Fe, NM, two years earlier. Through an organization called LA Compost, he discovered the Solano Community Garden in...

A new novel recalls a famous heist. I’ve just finished reading Jonathan Santlofer’s hugely entertaining thriller The Last Mona Lisa, a lively yarn that taps into our present-day fascination with all things Leonardo and takes the reader into the sometimes violent...

By Ruth Hiller It’s probably difficult to pinpoint the very first artist to make a shaped construction, an artwork that hovers somewhere between painting and sculpture.  The possibilities for non-rectangular paintings begin as early as the 1920s with fanciful...

It used to be that the favored genre for fiction about art and artists was the pseudo-biography, like Irving Stone’s Lust for Life and The Agony and the Ecstasy. Or if you were in search of lighter fare, you turned to a glamorous art-world setting…

How Dealers Decide What Your Artwork Should Cost As you might expect in a business that is guided by ineffable factors like talent, taste, trends, and individual potential for growth, galleries don’t have any one set system for determining what to charge for a work of...

Compared with the duration of empires past—like those of ancient Rome or Great Britain—the U.S. occupies a relatively tiny span of time, a little more 234 years as the great democratic experiment, if we date the founding of the country to 1776. And so our monuments...

Throughout the history of art there have been innovations that have entirely revolutionized the way work is made, looked at, and thought about. Painting with oils, the technique invented and perfected by Early Netherlandish artists, meant that a higher degree of...

Those calling the shots in the art world can be astonishingly cruel. Sculptor Stan Smokler, who maintains studios in New York and Pennsylvania, recalls sending out slides in the early days of his career…