 | |
 Cover of the November 2024 issue, featuring Hans Haacke | |
| Editor in chief | Mark Rappolt |
|---|---|
| Categories | Contemporary art |
| Frequency | Nine times a year |
| Publisher | ArtReview Ltd |
| Founded | 1949 |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Based in | London |
| Language | English |
| Website | www |
| ISSN | 1745-9303 |
ArtReview is an international contemporary art magazine based in London, founded in 1948. Its sister publication, ArtReview Asia, was established in 2013.
Launched as a fortnightly broadsheet in February 1949 by a retired country medical practitioner, Dr Richard Gainsborough, and the first edition was designed by his wife, the artist Eileen Mayo, [1] Arts News and Review set out to champion contemporary art in Britain, providing its readers with commentary, news and reviews. [2] At the outset its focus was set firmly on the artist – its regular cover ‘Portrait of the artist’ introduced its readership to emerging artists as well as reconnecting with the past masters of modernism from before the war. Cover artists included Édouard Manet, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Lucian Freud. As its editorial would declare in 1954, Art News and Review's purpose was ‘to stimulate the criticism of contemporary art, to give to both painters and writers space they would never find elsewhere, and to endeavour to present a balanced and comprehensive picture of living art in twentieth-century Britain.’ Critics such as David Sylvester and John Berger, cut their teeth in its pages during the 1950s, as it covered the growing trend of abstract art, and the lively debates provoked by the arrival of American Abstract Expressionism, while Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham celebrated new attitude towards art that embraced science, industry and mass culture, elaborating the terms of what became known as ‘Pop’ art. In 1954 Henri Matisse wrote for the magazine. [3]
Renaming itself Arts Review in March 1961, the magazine charted the advent of Pop art and the sharper look of ‘New Generation’ sculpture and hard-edge painting, while young critics like Brian Sewell balanced the merits of non-figurative art against socialist realism, and Jasia Reichardt, the assistant editor of the title, [4] looked towards art's growing involvement with technology. By the end of the 1960s Arts Review was pondering the ‘unparalleled fragmentation’ in art, remarking that art ‘has still to find the power to draw communities together, and heal’. [5] Socially-minded young critics such as Richard Cork, Peter Fuller and Janet Daley would bring their voices to the complexities of conceptual art in the recession-hit 1970s, a period marked by a conservative backlash against contemporary art. Arts Review weathered the economic turmoil of a changing art market into the 1980s, widening its attention to the resurgent markets and cultures of craft and design, while following the turn towards the new figurative painting and sculpture that characterised art in Britain during the Thatcher decade.
By 1993 Arts Review had relaunched as the monthly magazine Art Review. Sensing a new, more youthful and irreverent mood taking shape in contemporary art, it put Gilbert & George on the cover, and drew a growing readership to the work of the 'Young British Artists’, towards the internationalising art world of the 2000s.
By 2006 ArtReview had reinvented itself once more, to grapple with the artistic product of an artworld now thriving not only in Britain, Europe and the US, but also in Asia, Latin America and Africa. Artists featured on the cover have included Yayoi Kusama, Subodh Gupta, Liam Gillick, Ai Weiwei, Thomas Hirschhorn, Keren Cytter, Steve McQueen, Yael Bartana, Phyllida Barlow, Dóra Maurer, Tacita Dean, Danh Vo, Sarah Lucas, Fernanda Gomes, Ragnar Kjartansson, Geta Brătescu. [6] In 2012 ArtReview published a special supplement on Brazilian art history, and has since expanded its coverage of the country's art scene. In 2018 it produced an issue looking at the legacy of the Situationists. [6]
In June 2019, the magazine announced that Modern Media Holdings had acquired a majority stake in its publisher ArtReview Ltd. [7]
Lawrence Alloway, J. G. Ballard, Reyner Banham, Cecil Beaton, Sister Wendy Beckett, John Berger, Nicolas Bourriaud, Michael Bracewell, Anita Brookner, Jan Carew, Matthew Collings, Maurice Collis, John Coplans, Richard Cork, Janet Daley, Marie Darrieussecq, Geoff Dyer, Kenneth Frampton, Peter Fuller, Patrick Heron, Anthony Hill, Stewart Home, Siri Hustvedt, Liam Gillick, Frederick Joss, David Lee, Henri Matisse, Eileen Mayo, Rosie Millard, Eric Newton, Victor Pasmore, Nikolaus Pevsner, Heather Phillipson, Herbert Read, Bryan Robertson, Arundhati Roy, Jasia Reichardt, Brian Sewell, David Sylvester, Marina Vaizey, Christian Viveros-Fauné, and Max Wykes-Joyce. [8]
Since 2002 ArtReview has published its annual Power 100 list, a guide to the 100 most powerful figures in contemporary art. [9] The list is compiled up an anonymous international committee of art world professionals. The magazine claims that the list is judged according to a person's ability to influence the type of art that is being produced today, play a role in shaping the public perspective of art, they have to have been active in the previous 12 months before the list is published and have to have an international rather than exclusively domestic influence. [10]
In October 2011, the magazine was criticised by the Chinese government for placing Ai Weiwei at number one of that year's Power 100. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Weimin responded "China has many artists who have sufficient ability. We feel that a selection that is based purely on a political bias and perspective has violated the objectives of the magazine". [11]
ArtReview Asia was launched in 2013 as a quarterly magazine. Along with a quarterly Chinese edition of ArtReview, introduced in 2022 in collaboration with Yishu Shijie, ArtReview Asia offers an eclectic mix of content. This includes criticism, reviews, commentary, and analysis, complemented by commissioned projects from artists, informative guides, and a range of special supplements. [12] Artists featured on the cover have included Lee Kit, Carsten Nicolai, Lee Bul, Ming Wong, Eko Nugroho, Cao Fei and Nalini Malani. [6] Contributors include literary theorist Sung Ge, artist Heman Chong, novelist Prabda Yoon and novelist Charu Nivedita, who writes a regular column.
In 2016 and 2017 ArtReview Asia collaborated with the Shanghai art fair West Bund Art & Design to curate 'Xiàn Chǎng', a series of solo artist projects both within the fair around the local area. [13]
The website, artreview.com, was launched in 2007. The website features art news and opinion pieces, as well as content from the magazine.
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
The Independent Group (IG) met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, England, from 1952 to 1955. The IG consisted of painters, sculptors, architects, writers and critics who wanted to challenge prevailing modernist approaches to culture. They introduced mass culture into debates about high culture, re-evaluated modernism and created the "as found" or "found object" aesthetic. The subject of renewed interest in a post-disciplinary age, the IG was the topic of a two-day, international conference at the Tate Britain in March 2007. The Independent Group is regarded as the precursor to the Pop Art movement in Britain.
Lawrence Reginald Alloway was an English art critic and curator who worked in the United States from 1961. In the 1950s, he was a leading member of the Independent Group in the UK and in the 1960s was an influential writer and curator in the US. He first used the term "mass popular art" in the mid-1950s and used the term "Pop Art" in the 1960s to indicate that art has a basis in the popular culture of its day and takes from it a faith in the power of images. From 1954 until his death in 1990, he was married to the painter Sylvia Sleigh.
Neo-futurism is a late-20th to early-21st-century movement in the arts, design, and architecture.
This Is Tomorrow was an art exhibition in August 1956 at the Whitechapel Art Gallery on Whitechapel High Street in London's East End, UK, facilitated by curator Bryan Robertson. The core of the exhibition was the ICA Independent Group.
John McHale was a Scottish artist, art theorist, sociologist and future studies searcher. He was a member of the Independent Group, a British movement that originated pop art which grew out of an interest in American mass culture and post–World War II technologies.
Feng Boyi is an independent art curator and critic in China. His work focusses primarily on contemporary Chinese art, working with museums and displaying art collections. He has worked several times with artist Ai Weiwei, publishing his journals illegally or working with him in exhibitions and has organized many controversial art exhibitions in China. He has been assistant editor of the China Artists' Association newsletter Artist's Communication since 1988. He has also edited and published numerous catalogues and papers on art and established the Artists' Alliance, a major online forum for contemporary art in China. Feng Boyi has been known to be an instigator to the up-and-coming contemporary art movement in Beijing, starting with publishing articles and journals from artists Ai Weiwei and Xu Bing.
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In April 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport for "economic crimes," and detained for 81 days without charge. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.
ArtAsiaPacific is the longest running English-language periodical solely dedicated to covering contemporary art and culture from sixty-seven countries, territories, and Chinese Special Administrative Regions that it considers to be within Asia, the Pacific, and the Middle East. It is published six times a year and is distributed internationally. A regular issue includes feature-length articles on artists, themes or events; essays; profiles on artists or collectors; reviews of biennials, exhibitions, art publications and films; news including obituaries and appointments; auction and art fair reports; and previews of shows.
Excessivism is an art movement. In 2015 American artist and curator Kaloust Guedel introduced it to the world with an exhibition titled Excessivist Initiative. The review of the exhibition written by art critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot, titled "Excessivism: Irony, Imbalance and a New Rococo" was published in the Huffington Post. Its early adopters go back to late 20th century.
Tang Contemporary Art Gallery is a commercial art gallery with branches in China, Hong Kong and Thailand.
Cybernetic Serendipity was an exhibition of cybernetic art curated by Jasia Reichardt, shown at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England, from 2 August to 20 October 1968, and then toured across the United States. Two stops in the United States were the Corcoran Annex, Washington, D.C., from 16 July to 31 August 1969, and the newly opened Exploratorium in San Francisco, from 1 November to 18 December 1969.
Jasia Reichardt is a British art critic, curator, art gallery director, teacher and prolific writer, specialist in the emergence of computer art. In 1968 she was curator of the landmark Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is generally known for her work on experimental art. After the deaths of Franciszka and Stefan Themerson she catalogued their archive and looks after their legacy.
Zuoxiao Zuzhou, is a Chinese musician and artist.
The Free Ai Weiwei street art campaign was a series of protests during the PRC government's secret detention of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for 81 days in 2011, organised by Hong Kong artists and art supporters. Various slogans calling for the immediate release of the artist such as "Free Ai Weiwei", and "Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei" accompany stencilled images of Ai were applied onto pavements, pedestrian overpass, and building walls all over Hong Kong, and similar posters and signs were displayed worldwide.
Ethan Cohen is an American collector and art dealer based in New York City who specialises in contemporary Chinese art and contemporary African art. He was one of the first western dealers to sell work by contemporary Japanese and Chinese artists including Ushio Shinohara and Ai Weiwei. He has been called "one of the most influential art dealers in the world". Forbes praised his gallery as an "exemplar in the field", putting on "resplendent, probing shows".
Jeff Kelley is an art critic, author, and curator. A practicing art critic since 1977, his reviews and essays about artists including Chinese conceptual artist Ai Weiwei have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, and the Los Angeles Times.
Kui Hua Zi (Sunflower Seeds) is an art installation created by contemporary artist and political activist Ai Weiwei. It was first exhibited at the Tate Modern art gallery in London from 12 October 2010 to 2 May 2011. The work consisted of one hundred million individually hand-crafted porcelain sunflower seeds which filled the gallery's 1,000 square metre Turbine Hall to depth of ten centimetres.
Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World is an exhibition that took place at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York between October 6, 2017 – January 7, 2018. The exhibition presents works by seventy-one artists and artist collectives across China and worldwide, who define contemporary experience in and of China. Looking at a period between the Tiananmen Square Protests, which also coincides with the end of the Cold War, and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, the exhibition explores a time when "anything seemed possible" and artists from China sought visibility in the global art world. The curators of the exhibition write that the works in this exhibition respond to how China went through a radical transformation between 1989 and 2008, which had an unmatchable impact at the global level. The exhibition has been considered as "an invaluable window" onto the intersection of contemporary art, politics, and history, and as an opportunity to ask questions about the role of museums as sites of learning how one could be a global citizen today. It also traveled to Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2018 and 2019, respectively.