Take Me (I’m Yours) is a re-staging of a show that first appeared at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995, when it was conceived of by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and artist Christian Boltanski. In this 2016 New York edition, curators Obrist and Jens Hoffmann feature more works by 42 artists.
Christian Boltanski
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Prends-Ça! A Paris Exhibition Invites Visitors to Take the Artworks with Them
PARIS — Take Me (I’m Yours) at the Monnaie de Paris revives and expands a 1995 exhibition curated by Christian Boltanski and Hans-Ulrich Obrist at London’s Serpentine Gallery, in which all the art is designed to be touched and taken away.
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Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: vandals tag a Munich museum with swastikas, hunters venture onto Texan museum’s grounds, and a public sculpture is mysteriously beheaded.
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HSBC Leak Reveals Art World’s Forays into Sketchy Swiss Banking
The recent HSBC leak, which has revealed that between 2006 and 2007 the bank’s Swiss branch helped clients conceal some $102 billion from tax authorities, lists a number of prominent art and culture figures among the 30,000 people whose account information was released.
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Art That Thinks Inside the Box
What is it about boxes that is so fascinating? I was thinking this as I went into Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art to see Pandora’s Box, a show that displays artist Joseph Cornell’s signature assemblages alongside the works of artists who allegedly were inspired by him or who were in artistic sympathy with him. I can think of historical precedents: medieval reliquaries; Victorian memento mori, which often look strikingly like Cornell’s miniature worlds. But these forebears don’t quite explain the combination of weirdness and visual beauty of something made by Cornell, nor the undoubted fascination with him since his death. His boxes frame the objects in a different way than a conventional picture frame, of course; they concentrate the viewer’s attention; but there’s something else, which finally came to me after I’d seen this show.
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Seeing Through the Crowds at the 2011 Venice Biennale Part I: The Giardini and Pavilions
Editor’s Note: Peter Dobey published a series of photo essays (1, 2, 3) about this year’s Venice Biennale at the beginning of June. This is a long-form essay (to be published in three parts) that explores the work at the Biennale.
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PARIS — It is difficult to write about Venice, just like it is difficult to really SEE Venice. Individual experiences of art fade away into the oversaturation that is the Venice Biennale in the same way the city of Venice is sinking into the Adriatic. There is the ontological experience of Venice and the problem of one’s ability to encounter it. Then there is the physical impossibility to see everything the Biennale offers you and all the things it doesn’t, especially when in Italy.
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Photos from the 54th Venice Biennale, Part 2
More images from the world’s oldest and largest art biennial event, the Venice Biennale, including photos from the François Pinault Foundation, the French, Haitian, Danish, Swedish, Swiss and the Venezuelan pavilions.
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Photos from the 54th Venice Biennale, Part 1
The voluminousness of the Venice Biennale can be overwhelming, much like the city of Venice itself. Talking with Venetian friends, I heard the city described as a “creature,” a labyrinthine monster that will suffocate you if you don’t know how to find the campos, or other open-air spaces where you can stretch out and breathe. Inhabited by more tourists than actual residents, the city is shaped by the pre-conceived notions of its visitors; in short, Venice is a place that does not fully exist. The same feeling follows you into the exhibitions of the Biennale.