conceptual art

How Michael Craig-Martin changed a glass of water into a full-grown oak tree

14 September 2024 9:00 am

‘Of all the things I’ve drawn,’ Michael Craig-Martin reflects, ‘to me chairs are one of the most interesting.’ We are…

‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’: Sophie Calle interviewed

4 November 2023 9:00 am

‘You cannot begin by calling me France’s most famous living artist!’ Thus Sophie Calle objected to the first line of…

Inane, modish and safe: The White Pube podcast reviewed

28 November 2020 9:00 am

The White Pube started life as an influential art blog, written by Zarina Muhammad and Gabrielle de la Puente. The…

The artist who left no physical record of her work

2 May 2020 9:00 am

While locked-down galleries compete to keep their artists in the public eye — or ear — by uploading interview podcasts,…

Why has figurative painting become fashionable again?

7 September 2019 9:00 am

The figure is back. Faces stare, bodies sprawl, fingers swipe, mums clutch, hands loll. The Venice Biennale was full of…

Art is often best experienced on the radio

6 April 2019 9:00 am

At its best audio can be a much more visual medium than the screen. Making Art with Frances Morris (produced…

‘One World’ by Mark Wallinger

The winner of the 2018 What’s That Thing? Award for bad public art is…

8 December 2018 9:00 am

Not a bad year for the award. Honourable mentions must go to the landfill abstractions of Oxford’s new Westgate Centre,…

A kind of blue: Yves Klein’s ‘Jonathan Swift’ (c.1960) amid the Van Dycks and Joshua Reynolds

A visionary and playful heir to Duchamp: Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace

11 August 2018 9:00 am

Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph —…

‘The First Days of Spring’, 1929, by Salvador Dalí

It’s the thought that counts

21 October 2017 9:00 am

During a panel discussion in 1949, Frank Lloyd Wright made an undiplomatic comment about Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated picture of 1912,…

‘Merde d’Artiste’, 1961, by Piero Manzoni

In defence of conceptual art

16 April 2016 9:00 am

At the tail end of last year, an artist called Peter Goodfellow mounted an exhibition of paintings titled Treason of…

Pretentiousness isn’t such a crime

20 February 2016 9:00 am

Aversion to pretentiousness was probably an English trait before Dr Johnson famously refuted Bishop Berkeley’s arguments for the immateriality of…

'Lion Hunt', 1861, by Eugène Delacroix

Galleries are getting bigger - but is there enough good art to put in them?

2 January 2016 9:00 am

Martin Gayford recommends the exhibitions to see — and to avoid — over the coming year

2016 will be a vintage year for tech billionaires and jihadis

2 January 2016 9:00 am

This is going to be one hell of a year, hell being the operative word. It will be the year…

‘Socialist realism and pop art in the battlefield’, 1969, by Equipo Cronica

The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern - our critic goes zzzzz

19 September 2015 8:00 am

The conventional history of modern art was written on the busy Paris-New York axis, as if nowhere else existed. For…

Richard Long installing the large slate cross, Time and Space (2015), at the Arnolfini

Richard Long interview: ‘I was always an artist, even when I was two years old’

8 August 2015 9:00 am

William Cook explores the elemental art and Olympian walks of Richard Long