Here’s How Top Collectors Decide Whether an Acquisition Is Actually Worth Their Investment
For collectors, acquiring art is rarely just about the object in hand—it’s about the context and the connection. Whether they're drawn to emerging voices, historical relevance, or deeply personal narratives, collectors not only shape their own environments with their resources but also the cultural landscape at large. In CULTURED's weekly Collector Questionnaire, artists, patrons, and lifelong enthusiasts share what compels them to add to their troves of work. Across perspectives, one thing is clear: Collecting is as much about intuition as it is about scholarship, a dynamic interplay of passion and preservation. Here, a coterie of top collectors reflect on what drives them to seek out, live with, and ultimately champion the art that moves them.
If the Whitney Feels Different, It’s Probably Because of Adrienne Edwards
The fruit of six years of research, the immersiveness and (literal) lack of boundaries of the Whitney's "Edges of Ailey" are emblematic of Adrienne Edwards’s curatorial style—one that ignores separations between disciplines, honors history while breaking traditions, and stokes the cerebral (with references to queer theory, Derrida, and more) alongside the visceral and emotional. Following the end of its four-and-a-half month run in February, Performa biennial founder RoseLee Goldberg attested to its power: “It’s really the only exhibition I can think of where people were almost in tears as it was coming down.” “It’s hard to be poetic without seeming capricious, or scholarly without boring our audiences,” added Whitney director Scott Rothkopf, “but Adrienne can do it all.”
Here’s Everything You Need to Shop, Watch, or Listen to This Month According to Our Editors
The weather is starting to turn, and with the change comes the itch for spring cleaning, for newness, for wardrobe additions. Whichever is currently rippling through you, our editors have you covered with a fresh slate of cultural picks. This month’s selections from our books, design, and other editors span lost feminist anthologies, sculptural furniture, food-centric clothing, and an indie band on the brink of a breakthrough.
This Month, Show Up for These 12 Unmissable New York Solo Shows by Women Artists
It's women's history month, and although any of the year's 12 months would be a perfect time to go see a woman artist's new showing, March does bring special attention to this segment of the creative class. In New York, it also brings a plethora of exhibitions that add dimension and intrigue to the city. From rising painters to late conceptual greats, these 12 picks deserve a gallery hop of their own.
Hong Gyu Shin Opened an Art Gallery in College. Thirteen Years On, He's Still Pushing the Envelope.
I thought Hong Gyu Shin was one of the most interesting figures in the New York art scene even before I was sitting at his dining table, looking at his newly acquired Van Gogh. The small canvas, Head of a Peasant, painted in 1885, depicts a woman in profile with her hair gathered up into a dark hat. In Shin’s crowded hang, it shares wall space with a wildly varied range of artists, including the 1980s street artist Richard Hambleton, a peer of Basquiat and Haring whose two “Shadowman” figures loom like apparitions overhead. Anyone with deep enough pockets can buy a Van Gogh. But few Van Goghs go on to join such eclectic company.
Meet Four Architects Reinventing the Public Library as We Know It
Toyo Ito's Sendai Mediatheque, an earthquake-proof, sci-fi library, built around tubular, tree-trunk structural columns, is a feat of engineering and a beacon of ambitious programming for the community. As we entered the 21st century, all eyes were fixated on this civic alien creature as a harbinger of things to come. Sendai Mediatheque ushered in a new era of library architecture around the world. As we spend endless hours on our mobile phones and Kindles, libraries have eagerly embraced an expanded role as a public good and anchor of civic life—and architecture is often the lynchpin to capturing repeat visitors when competition for their attention has never been greater. Here, we highlight four of America’s best designed libraries, and ask the architects behind them to offer some additional insight into their favorite shelving systems and books.
Christine Sun Kim’s mid-career retrospective “All Day All Night” at the Whitney isn’t one of those exhibitions that reactionaries can use to claim identity’s role as some dour bogeyman in the art world. Thanks to Kim’s witty, piercing, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny pieces across video, ceramics, and drawing (which span the early 2010s to the present), such a reductionist reading would be impossible. For Kim, a native user of American Sign Language, Deaf identity is an open door, and musical notation is a universalizing motif. The works, installed throughout the museum and on the entire eighth floor, include black, blue, and red charcoal-and-pastel drawings—ranging in scale from roughly poster-size to A6 paper—that are like better, smarter David Shrigleys, or akin to Cy Twombly’s work in their use of rhythmic mark-making. How To Measure Quietness, 2014, quantifies, in descending order, quiet things—“the silent treatment” is a ppppppp cold ultra-pianissimo. Ouch. A shrug? Only pp.
There’s no elaborate stage work in ALL NIGHTER, the new play now running at New York’s MCC Theater Space. There are no small parts either—just five leads, a group of young women sitting at a table on campus during their last week of college for 95 minutes. No intermission. They’re attempting to pull, as the title suggests, one last all nighter to wrap their final assignments and toast to years spent living in their shared apartment, binge-drinking and stepping on each other’s toes, occasionally too hard to ignore. Throughout the play, the initially nostalgic comedy devolves into a simmering drama and eventual all-out brawl as the women excavate topics few young adults can adequately process. What toll does it take to face an abusive ex in the dining hall over four long years? How do the tight-knit friendships that sustain us also hold us back?
Here Are 12 Must-See Shows in Your Favorite Holiday Hotspots
As warm weather creeps in, so too does traffic on the expressway as vacationers hit the open road and fly off toward the beach or other destination. If you've been putting together any holiday plans, you might want to include a few stellar shows in the sketch. From ethereal canvases in Aspen to striking portraits in Savannah and gravity-defying sculptures in Miami, these must-see exhibitions offer the perfect vacation detour.
This Spring, the Guggenheim Shines a Light on One of Brazil's Most Beloved Artists
“Art has the power to make human ties stronger and help us think, feel, and look at things differently,” says Beatriz Milhazes. “Art can change people, and people can change the world into a better one.” In New York this spring, the artist’s humanistic worldview is at the center of her first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, whose permanent collection features a sextet of works by the Brazilian artist. Time spent with Milhazes’s intricately collaged paintings unveils hypnotic abstractions, undulating arabesques, and playful riffs on floral motifs.
