K
    Kathleen Massara

    Kathleen Massara

    Senior editor, Christies.com

  • You'll Never See Disney Characters The Same Way Again

    "WS" is billed as "a work in progress that will continue to evolve" at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The LA-based artist worked with his son, Damon McCarthy, to create an immersive space within the cavernous Wade Thompson Drill Hall. For his first job as the Armory’s new Artistic Director, Alex Poots teamed up with curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist as well as Tom Eccles to create the right setting for the collaborative father-son project, which takes Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" to truly disturbing places.

  • WATCH: Hilarious Photoshop Bus Stop Prank

    If you're waiting for the bus tomorrow, don't be surprised if you find yourself in an ad. Swedish photographer Erik Johansson recently teamed up with Adobe to prank unsuspecting people at the bus stop for "Adobe Creative Day," which is happening on June 11 in Paris and Stockholm. Two years ago, the photographer and master retoucher gave a TED Talk on making magical scenes "visually plausible." For his Adobe project, Johansson sits in a van, awaiting the next passerby for his hilarious Photoshop skills.

  • Eternity Is A Long Time

    This show is done with this approach,” Mike Kelley’s friend and former partner, Emi Fontana, tells me on a tour of the artist’s posthumous exhibit, “Eternity is a Long Time,” at the Pirelli Foundation’s gigantic renovated 42,000 square-foot art space in Milan known as HangarBicocca. Ten pieces from the late artist are now on view in a groundbreaking exhibition curated by Fontana as well as by Andrea Lissoni from HangarBicocca. “The reason why I was so interested in Mike’s work and him as a man was really he was combining… subculture and high culture with art history and poetry,” Fontana says.

  • LOOK: Wrapping-Up The Venice Biennale

    The Venice Biennale officially opened to the public on June 1, which means the VIP crowd was long gone by the time the common people were able to take a look at the much written about works from artists all over the globe. “Far from inaugurating, Venice crowns a career,” Chris Sharp writes in ArtReview. While it was true that Ai Weiwei, Jeremy Deller, and other big name artists were visible this year, the most interesting works on view were arguably by lesser-known artists like Marya Kazoun, Zanele Muholi and Tavares Strachan.

  • Venice Biennale Heats Up!

    "We can not appreciate art if it remains locked in a fortress," Massimiliano Gioni said in his Biennale Arte interview. Thierry Geoffroy, a Danish-French artist representing the Maldives Pavilion exemplifies this notion. Today the conceptual artist and troublemaker decided to shake things up at the Biennale by staging an intervention at the Giardini confronting climate change.

  • Earliest Known Cave Paintings Might Have Been Made By Neanderthals

    In a damp Spanish cave, Alistair Pike applies a small grinder to the world's oldest known paintings. Every few minutes, the dentist-drill sound stops and Pike, an archaeologist from the University of Southampton, UK, stands aside so that a party of tourists can admire the simple artwork — hazy red disks, stencilled handprints, the outlines of bison — daubed on the cave wall tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, Pike's grinder — and the scalpel that he wields to scrape off tiny samples — is doing no harm to the actual paintings, and he is working with the full approval of the Spanish authorities.

  • Garrison Keillor Tells Us The Difference Between Plumbing And Storytelling

    Garrison Keillor, the host for the 2013 Moth Ball in New York, said he was once asked this question by a fan. The host of "A Prairie Home Companion" guided the guests through an evening of storytelling from Adam Gopnik, Richard Price, and Satori Shakoor.

  • Really?! You Call This Art?

    In the wake of the Frieze Art Fair in New York, we tried to make sense of the overwhelming amount of mirrored objects, food sculptures and shelving units masquerading as art. As the art market soars and artists and galleries cash in on ridiculous trends, Andy Warhol's line rings true for many: "Good business is the best art."  But as the artist Alex Katz told Jerry Saltz in New York Magazine, "Weak people are corrupted by money.

  • Artist Gets His First Gallery Show...At 87 Years Old

    Such is the case for David Byrd, an artist based in upstate New York who has quietly painted for decades. Greg Kucera, the owner of an eponymous gallery in Seattle, first found out about Byrd through the artist's next door neighbor, Jody Isaacson, who Kucera represents at his gallery. In a phone interview with the artist, he said, "I’m a loner, so work is important.

  • 'We Are Not Actually In Charge Of Life'

    Billy Childish is the iconic mustachioed English singer/songwriter and artist who has been plugging away at his work for decades. The iconoclast is not one for joining groups, though he did start the art movement known as "Stuckism" in the late '90s. In 2006, the lovable curmudgeon and head of The Headcoats got into a public feud with Jack White, boasting to NME that he had "a bigger collection of hats, a better moustache" and "a more blistering guitar sound." Needless to say, his cheeky comments didn't endear him to the Detroit rock n' roller. "Let’s just say my sense of humor has successfully thwarted many careers," he once told Metro UK.

  • Patti Smith Performs Surprise Show At The Beach

    Rockaway Beach, a Queens neighborhood hit hard by Hurricane Sandy  in October, is still rough around the edges. Andrea Gidder and Steve Fox, two Rockaway residents who have been living in the area since 1980, spoke to HuffPost about the large number of artists and curators who have recently moved to the area. Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMa PS1 in Queens who recently moved to the area, spoke to the audience about his last time on the boardwalk with Smith before the hurricane hit.

  • You Won't Believe What These Drummers Can Do!

    The Top Secret Drum Corps in Basel, Switzerland is renown for its members precision and dexterity. The Corps consists of 25 young male drummers and colorguard members who hold day jobs but believe in the power of the beat. Now, however, the Corps incorporates Scottish and American styles into their repertoire, and even include juggling and light displays, their website proclaims.

  • Fading Photos From Fleet Week

    In 2010, Paul Solberg looped a Polaroid camera around his neck and headed to the west side of Manhattan for Fleet Week. The photographer, who is one half of The Hilton Brothers, wanted to "strike up conversations with the sailors and marines," he said in an email to The Huffington Post. After getting some great shots, Solberg biked home and later discovered the expired film stock he used was quickly deteriorating, so he developed what he could in the darkroom.

  • Now You Can Visit A Major Art Fair In Your Underwear

    Today the ambitious online art database known as Artsy launched a preview of works to be displayed at this year's Armory Show in New York, which runs from March 7-10. At its launch, Americans saw the most risqué avant-garde art flown in from European capitals, attempting to wrap their minds around Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" (1912) or Odilon Redon's dreamy oeuvre. The team at Artsy got over 2500 works from over 200 galleries to agree to exhibit their work on the Internet.

  • Psy Makes Everyone Horse Dance At Korean Presidential Inauguration

    Yesterday, South Korea celebrated its first female president with an inauguration ceremony that included Korea's biggest international pop sensation, Park Jae-Sang -- better known as Psy, Foreign Policy reports. Park Geun-hye was officially sworn in on Monday at the National Assembly in Seoul, and according to the Hollywood Reporter, the new president is a big fan of Psy's dance moves. For the performance in front of Korean lawmakers, the glossy pop icon wore a tux, and was accompanied by a bevy of shiny suit-wearing female backup dancers. "I know this is a very formal event but if you could please stand up and join me for the horse dance, it would be great," Psy reportedly told the crowd.

  • Time Warner VP Hosts Party After Dumping Ovation

    Last night, Time Warner Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer Jeffrey Hirsch reportedly co-hosted a posh VIP party on a 150-foot yacht, according to the New York Post. In January, Ovation released impressive growth figures, citing 35% gains from 2011 to 2012.

  • The Year In Arts&Culture

    In case your memory is foggy, we'd like to remind you of what happened in Arts&Culture in 2012. As many of you now know, Thomas Kinkade, the "painter of light," passed away in April. In this Sept. 15, 2006 file photo, artist Thomas Kinkade unveils his painting, "Prayer For Peace," at the opening of the exhibit "From Abraham to Jesus," in Atlanta.

  • 'The Biggest Find In Rome Since The Forum Was Uncovered'

    On Wednesday, archeologists revealed the remains of an ancient arts center underneath Rome dating back to 123 AD, according to the Guardian. Archeologists discovered the arts center during excavations for a new subway line to run through the Italian capital.

  • New Film Shows You Can't Escape Your Heart

    In the opening scene of "Tabu," the latest film by director Miguel Gomes, we learn "you can run as long as you can and as far as you can, but you cannot escape your heart." This warning will haunt Aurora, a glamorous but mentally unstable elderly woman living in Lisbon whose servant and lonely neighbor are her constant companions. In the first part of the film, we see Aurora in Lisbon, gambling her money away, but in the second part young Aurora is a risk-taker in love.

  • Dusty Springfield...Musical Revolutionary?

    Most people think of the classic album "Dusty in Memphis" if they think of Dusty Springfield at all. "What drew me first was her talent, and trying to find out where that sound came from," Holly Smith told The Huffington Post in a phone interview. Springfield, née Mary O'Brien, grew up in Buckinghamshire, England.