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Yves Klein

Architecture

10 Beautiful Blue Buildings from Around the World

By Claire Cottrell on

What’s more rare than a blue moon? A beautiful blue building! If you haven’t heard, there will be a blue moon rising in the Eastern sky tonight at 7:25pm. One of the more famous astrological occurrences (thanks in part to the world’s most popular love song), a blue moon isn’t actually blue, it’s just the term used to describe the second full moon in a month, which appears, on average, every 2.7 years.

In talking about the significance of the shade, Yves Klein, the French artist famous for his monochromatic paintings of the hue, said that “blue has no dimensions; it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not… blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.” In honor of tonight’s lunar event, we thought we’d take a look at some of the most intriguing blue architecture in the world to see if his statement holds up. From a design experiment exploring the psychological effects of living in an entirely blue world to Frida Kahlo’s cobalt colored home in Mexico City, click through to check out some of the most beguiling blue buildings around the world. … Read More

Art

Extremely Silly Photos of Extremely Serious Artists

By Emily Temple on

You might think visual artists have it easy — hanging out with models and making pretty pictures — but after a long day of churning out portraits (at the Factory, perhaps) or patiently mixing colors, every serious artist needs to cut loose and let his silly side shine. After all, writers can’t have all the fun, can they? In fact, from what we can tell, artists come up with some of the strangest and funniest ways to play, and we’ve collected a few snaps of their most ridiculous escapades, both candid and posed, here. Click through to check out our gallery of very silly photos of very serious (or at least seriously acclaimed) visual artists, and when you’re through, you just might consider putting aside your work for the afternoon and going out to play. … Read More

Art

The Most Staggering Sales at Art Basel 2011

By Allese Baker on

Art Basel, the most legendary, prestigious art fair in the world — which this year featured $1.8 billion in art — closed with a spectacular bang Sunday. Galleries boasted of epic sales, Gagosian selling $45 million worth of art within the first 45 minutes of the fair, and works by artists like Mark Rothko, Maurizio Cattelan, Anish Kapoor, and Bridget Riley fetching well over $2 million. Bloomberg declared that the art the market was officially back to, if not above, “peak of the boom” 2007-2008 levels and Forbes called the fair a feeding frenzy, reporting that billionaires and celebrities were sweeping up artworks at world-record prices. If the soaring sales at Basel serve as any sort of economic barometer, it’s clear that the disparity between the rich and the poor is graver than ever. The following list chronicles ten of the most mind-boggling sales at Basel this year. … Read More

News

The Hotel Chelsea: A Cultural History

By Judy Berman on

Although it’s been embattled and its legacy tarnished in the past few years, Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea remains a spiritual landmark for those who remember (or simply romanticize) the old, weird New York. So it’s jarring news to learn that the Chelsea is now up for sale. Its owners claim that the place’s legacy will be preserved, and we sure hope they mean it.

To understand exactly what’s at stake here, we’ve put together a timeline of cultural events that took place at or were inspired by the Hotel Chelsea in the past 60 years. Of course, since its relationship to the art, music, and literary world is too enormous to measure, we’ve had to leave a lot out. Add your favorite Hotel Chelsea moments in the comments. … Read More

Art

Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void

By Paul Laster on

One of the most influential yet under-known artists of the 20th century, Yves Klein virtually reinvented contemporary art in the 1950s with his embrace of space and fascination with the immaterial. From signing the sky and creating his own blue pigment that represented it to painting with fire and flesh, Klein paved the way for the conceptual, minimal, and performance art movements that followed. He made monochromatic paintings and sculptures, constructed a gallery exhibition out of nothing, threw the value of a work of art into a river, used nude bodies like brushes to apply paint to paper, let the wind and rain shape his canvases, and took a monumental leap into the void. A Rosicrucian and martial arts master, Klein had an intellectual and spiritual relationship with art that went beyond what most artists ever consider. … Read More