David Galenson

"Art's popular. That's my generation. It wasn't before." So declared Damien Hirst in 2000. Anyone who has any doubt of the validity of Hirst's claim should go directly to his current retrospective exhibition at London's Tate Modern. When I first went, on a Bank Holiday, the long lines and excited...

David Hockney recently touched off a controversy with a poster advertising his new exhibition at London's Royal Academy of Arts that read: "All the works here were made by the artist himself, personally." When the BBC journalist Andrew Marr asked Hockney if the statement was a dig at...

In 2009, the art historian William Wallace published an article titled, "Michelangelo: Separating Theory and Practice." Wallace observed that Michelangelo regularly changed his mind in the course of carving his sculptures. He abandoned more than a third of all the sculptures he began, and in the last three...

On a cold, sunny day in Paris, the Sunday before Christmas, I met Camille Saint-Jacques for lunch at Au Petit Riche, a beautiful traditional bistro near the Drouot auction house, decorated in the red velvet and dark wood of the Belle Epoque. I first met Camille a decade ago, and...

As far back as he could remember, Auguste Rodin loved to draw. When it came time for him to prepare for a career, his parents sent him to a school of commercial art. There, he recalled, when he saw artist's clay for the first time, "I thought I had gone...

Hilary Harkness has very impressive credentials. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Berkeley, then received an MFA from Yale. She blogs about painting for the New York Academy of Art. Since 2004 she has been represented by the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. She...

"At the age of 23, Helen Frankenthaler painted Mountains and Sea (1952)." This was the opening of The Guardian's obituary for Frankenthaler, who died last week at the age of 83. Later in the obituary, Michael McNay commented that "Her work never departed from the example of Mountains and Sea."...

In a contemporary art world filled with the unusual and often the bizarre, one of the very most improbable stories must be that of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Her remarkable career is currently the subject of a major retrospective exhibition at Paris' Centre Pompidou; when it closes there in...

In a 1999 essay, Ernst van de Wetering, professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam and chairman of the Rembrandt Research Project, noted that Rembrandt had painted himself at least 40 times, had etched himself 31 times, and had drawn a handful of self-portraits. Van de Wetering then...

In a time when the actions of bankers and hedge fund managers fuel instability not only in financial markets but also in the market for advanced art, many in the art world complain bitterly of the invasion of their sacred domain by these crass and unworthy money-lenders. These delicate...

A key difference between conceptual and experimental novelists is the role of plot. Conceptual novelists privilege the plot, carefully planning an elegant structure that leads inexorably to a closed ending -- a conclusion that not only resolves the suspense of the narrative, but provides a moral...

In a recent article, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett argued that it is difficult to predict where centers for the production of art will emerge. Citing the rise of Soho and Chelsea in New York from the '70s through the '90s, and of London's East End in the '90s, she cautioned...

Frans Hals is often overshadowed by the other two great artistic geniuses of the Dutch Golden Age, Rembrandt van Rijn and Johannes Vermeer. Yet there is one dimension in which Hals stands clearly apart not only from his contemporaries, but from all but a few of the great artists in...

Huffington Post recently pointed out that one-hit wonders are not unique to popular music. One-hit wonders in fact appear in all the arts.

There are many writers whose careers have been dominated by a single novel. Famous examples include: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Henry Roth,...

In a single, medium-sized room, Amsterdam's magisterial Rijksmuseum currently has on display an exhibition of less than two dozen works in total, all small in size: two paintings by Rembrandt, four by Degas, the remainder etchings by the two artists. But although the exhibition is small, its theme is large--no...

There is a common belief that all movie auteurs are dictators, like Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, who carefully plan every detail of their films, then meticulously control the performances of their actors and the work of their technicians in creating the films. This...

In 1928, four-year-old Gyula Kosice arrived in Buenos Aires with his family, Hungarian immigrants seeking a better life in Argentina. What he never forgot from the ocean voyage was the endless expanse of water, and the stars that sparkled in the night sky. Water and light would later become central...

The distinguished literary critic Robert McCrum wrote in The Observer last year that "Writers who flourish at the peak of their powers for longer than a decade, or even two, are rare birds," and he declared that peaks generally come early: "Most literary careers begin, and possibly end,...

On July 20, 2007, when Damien Hirst's infamous shark in formaldehyde was put on display at New York's Metropolitan Museum, the editors of the New York Times took time out from weightier matters to taunt that Hirst had "gone from being an artist to being what you might...

In last Sunday's New York Times, Randall Stross discussed a speech in which the blogger John Gruber drew a parallel between software designers and movie directors. In Gruber's version of auteur theory, the movie director makes all the decisions, and his employees carry them out. Steve Jobs was Gruber's...