Linda Yablonsky

  • Katz cutouts.
    diary October 26, 2022

    Herding Katz

    LAST FRIDAY EVENING, a sudden commotion interrupted the opening of “Alex Katz: Gathering” at the Guggenheim Museum.

    It was not a protest or a stunt. Just as outgoing director Richard Armstrong informed the New York Social Diary photographer Jill Krementz that the ninety-five-year-old artist was not expected to appear, he materialized—seemingly out of nowhere—on the bottom ramp of the rotunda. Once spotted, the sound of applause and cheers erupting in the lobby gained decibels as the hundreds of people on the upper tiers joined a spontaneous demonstration right out of Hello, Dolly!

    Looking swell

  • Maurizio Cattelan, Dakis Joannou, and Jeff Koons. All photos: Linda Yablonsky.
    diary July 03, 2022

    Sun Worshippers

    WHAT A RUSH to arrive in Athens and find it in the throes of a cultural renaissance! What else to make of the June 16 opening of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST), where the number of first-nighters topped five thousand? Of the new gallery district near the port of Piraeus, where Rodeo, Balice Hertling, and The Intermission were cohosting a show by Camille Blatrix, while such proudly post-crisis spaces as artist Angelo Plessas’s P.E.T. Projects are standing up for the local avant-garde?

    Then there was “Brice Marden and Antiquity” at the Museum of Cycladic Art. This compact survey of

  • View from a Venice water taxi. All photos: Linda Yablonsky.
    diary April 25, 2022

    Floating Feasts

    WHEN IT COMES TO ART, there is no such thing as a glutton. Not in Venice, where one can never get enough, certainly not during the VIP preview of a Biennale. The current edition, the fifty-ninth, has brought such a cornucopia of material from so many parts of the world to so many places around the lagoon that one might think every appetite would be sated. Alas, no! The social deprivations of the pandemic created a hunger for the IRL company of others in numbers that Covid protocols continued to repress. As Pinault Foundation curator Caroline Bourgeois told me, “Monsieur Pinault did not feel that

  • Left: Artist Camille Henrot. Right: MoMA director Glenn Lowry and Vuitton Foundation director Suzanne Pagé. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary October 18, 2017

    Dog Days

    IT WAS THE WEEK BEFORE FIAC and tout de Paris was calm. Without much fanfare—but in the presence of the Instagramming French president Emmanuel Macron—the Picasso Museum took the lead by opening “Picasso 1932: An Erotic Year.”

    Imagine Donald Trump showing support for a museum! (Or a museum inviting him to see pictures that he wasn’t in.)

    Macron picked the right show. Though limited to one year, and basically one subject—amour—this has to be the most resonant exhibition on view in Paris. You think you’ve seen enough Picasso?

    Trust me, you haven’t.

    “I’ve never seen a lot of this!”

  • Left: Dealer Nicholas Logsdail. Right: Dealer Agnieska Rayzacher, artist Nalalia LL, and curator Alison Gingeras. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary October 09, 2017

    Deep Frieze

    THE GREAT GIFT Frieze London bestowed on art aficionados this year was to propel them into galleries and museums.

    Not that Frieze itself didn’t offer benefits. Female artists were notable for their quantity and, in the case of a special section curated by Alison Gingeras, historical impact, as well as in-your-face pro-sex feminism. In the age of Trump the Aggressor, that’s risky business. It may not be entirely profitable business, but it is, at least, desirable.

    The fair also had an especially good program of talks put together by the estimable Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery, who

  • Left: ICA London director Stefan Kalmár and dealer Sadie Coles. Right: Artist Sarah Lucas and dealer Sarah Watson. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary October 04, 2017

    American Pie

    BREXIT OR NOT, London has thrown open its arms to American artists in what may be their biggest embrace since Pop.

    On the cusp of the current Frieze Week, the Royal Academy featured Jasper Johns, and the Serpentine Gallery had a show by the increasingly captivating Wade Guyton imported from Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. Tate Modern entered the home stretch of “Soul of a Nation,” its deeply satisfying survey of African American art. The Barbican had the spirited and atmospheric “Basquiat: Boom for Real,” while the ICA prepped for Seth Price, and Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery readied a full-on

  • Dancers Francesco Russo, Sara Lupoli, and Valeria D'Antonio with artist Eddie Peake, poet Holly Pester, and dancers Emma Fisher and Kieram Corrin Mitchell. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary July 28, 2017

    Peake Performance

    VESUVIUS WAS OFF-LIMITS.

    Rival factions of the Camorra, the crime syndicate that rules sanitation and trade in the Gulf of Naples, had set waste dumps on the slopes ablaze and the town was heating up, in more ways than one. It wasn’t just the mercury that was sizzling. People were going around naked.

    Cue Volcano Extravaganza 2017.

    Fiorucci Art Trust director Milovan Farronato and founder Nicoletta Fiorucci annually import this summertime bonding-in-art experience from their base in London. The Vinyl Factory returned as producing partner for the Extravaganza’s seventh edition (July 13 to 16), an

  • The opening night crowd lining up at the Deste Foundation's Slaughterhouse to see “Figa” by Kara Walker. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary June 29, 2017

    Greek to Me

    IN SOME PLACES, the art bubble can be benevolent—say, in Greece, the birthplace of democratic ideals.

    Remember ideals?

    If the country is in crisis politically, its art world is thriving. Or so it seemed when the plane landed in Athens during a drenching rain, unusual for the middle of June. Perhaps the gods objected to the art horde arriving from Basel for a weekend jaunt. Perhaps they just wanted to wash away the turmoil of the past—the recent past, that is. Ancient history lives in the visible foundations of this city. And what are foundations for if not to build something new?

    There lies Documenta

  • Left: Artist LaToya Ruby Frazier. Right: Artist Anders Clausen and Wolfgang Tillmans. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary June 18, 2017

    Making History

    THE REVIEWS ARE IN.

    “Our most successful ever.”

    “Exceptional.”

    “One of the most upbeat fairs I can remember!”

    That’s pretty much the consensus—from dealers—on the forty-eighth edition of Art Basel.

    Now that it’s over we can say that collectors paid big—hundreds of millions—for the big names and spent more good money on the next tier and the one after that. Even as the world ties itself into sorrier knots every day, the market for modern and contemporary art is booming.

    Is it like anxious eating? “Either that,” one dealer told me, “or it’s a demonstration of faith in art and a willingness to invest in

  • Left: High Line Art and Italian Pavilion curator Cecilia Alemani. Right: Studio Museum director Thelma Golden and artist Mark Bradford. (Except where noted, all photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary May 13, 2017

    World Clique

    THE VENICE ART BIENNALE is never just an assembly of national exhibitions competing for prominence and prizes. It’s a summit meeting marshaling the collective conscience of the art world.

    One could sense it build during the preopening events of the Biennale’s fifty-seventh edition, basically an invitation to mainline art while capitalizing on the social element and pretending business is not involved. Fat chance of that when the planet’s most carnivorous collectors are bending elbows with teams of dealers and advisers, top museum personnel, and deep benches of artists. Many, many artists.

    Indeed,

  • Left: Artists Justine Koons, Jeff Koons, and Alex Israel. Right: John Legend. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky)
    diary May 02, 2017

    Mirror Mirror

    LAST WEEK, the Santa Ana winds came in hot and blustery across Los Angeles just as Jeff Koons hit town. Their convergence cannot have been a coincidence. An artist who staked his career on inflatables would naturally be on equal terms with high winds. Generally, they blow in his direction. And these did.

    On Saturday, the Museum of Contemporary Art was to honor him at its star-studded annual benefit gala. On Thursday, Larry Gagosian—not one to let an opportunity slip by—opened a kind of popup Koons show that his Beverly Hills gallery assembled from three different bodies of work. Suffice it to

  • Left: Attorney Cherry Saraswati Bickerton and artist Ashley Bickerton. Right: Artist Damien Hirst. (All photos: Linda Yablonsky).
    diary April 24, 2017

    London Bridges

    DOES ANYONE REMEMBER when the social fabric of contemporary art had just a few threads, nearly all sewn in New York? When the same handful of people showed up for every opening at the few galleries worthy of the name? When everyone knew everyone else from the same bars and nightclubs (or beds)?

    Last week, London felt a bit like that. It was just after Easter, before Art Brussels and Gallery Weekend Berlin. People were conserving themselves for the Frieze New York–Venice Biennale–Documenta 14–Skulptur Projekte Münster–Art Basel gauntlet ahead. The city was quiet. Prime tables at popular bistros