Interview

Born in the Bronx, Kori Newkirk first moved to California for graduate art school in 1995 and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he began making work out of such obscure but provocative materials as hair extensions, pony beads, and pomade.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

In the early 2000s, a young painter emerged on the New York art scene, known for his hauntingly seductive figure paintings of friends and family members, executed in bright, bold colors and often set against elaborate wallpaper motifs. Mathew Cerletty, who shows at Rivington Arms gallery in New York, could have remained his generation's premier portrait artist. But in the last few years the 28-year-old Wisconsin native went in a completely different direction, creating strangely confrontational sign and word pieces that range from bizarre koans like "The Feeling is Mutual" to "Diet Coke" logos. Turns out, the words are just as autobiographical.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

We all have things wiped from our memories. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not. But Mike Kelley's sculptures and installations are impossible to forget-he challenges what we see and how we see it. He plumbs the depths of childhood, repressed memory, psychoanalysis, and pop mythos-but that's just the starting point for an individual speculative universe where things make startling, weird sense.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

The legend who brought a rebel color spectrum to the staid black-and-white art of photography swears he’s never been in a fight, that all his drinking buddies are dead, and he just may be color-blind.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/27/08

Walt Disney may have invented the theme park, but Jeff Koons is the undisputed all-American master when it comes to filling the physical world with outsize work that deftly reflects all the mixed-up dreams, romances, anxieties, and desires of the psychological one. And if it seems like his big, brash, and occasionally mind-boggling art has taken on a life of its own recently, then it's with good reason: Because everything is going according to plan.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08

First he outraged art audiences in the early 1990s with works like his shark in formaldehyde. (The New York city department of health banned one piece on the grounds that it might induce vomiting.) Then he outraged critics with tactics like decorating a cast of a human skull with 8,601 diamonds worth more than $20 million. Now, the ultimate British bad boy has outraged dealers by skipping the gallery and selling his work at auction. He may have just been making a little Hirst-style mischief-or changing the state of the art market forever.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08

He excavated the concrete floor of a gallery and warned that the exhibition "involves the risk of serious injury or death." He favors materials doomed to decay-dust, vegetables, cigarette packs, even cheese. And yet Urs Fischer's work revives the spirit of classical art. He's a master of meaningful spectacle who shows how memento mori keeps it real.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08

He made a fortune in rare, artistic gems. Now the dashing London tycoon is spending it to amass one of the most impressive contemporary art collections in the world. For this collector, you buy what you love. But love is usually complicated.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08

Elizabeth Peyton's illuminating portraits of rock stars, French heroes, wayward youths, and close friends are less concerned with who they are than what they do. Peyton captures a single fleeting moment and makes it live forever.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08

Tom Sachs is an artist whose Pop-the-Next-Generation Art melds seamlessly such heady and usually disparate notions as bricolage, dub, and magic with masterful results.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/26/08