Pierre HUYGHE

Every fortnight, Artprice provides a short round up of art market news.

The 53rd Venice Biennial Art Fair opens to the public on 7 June 2009. For six months it presents a panorama of global contemporary art in pavilions representing the artists and countries invited. Launched in 1895, the Venice biennial has a long tradition of selecting a handful of artists to receive its prestigious prizes. Do the Golden Lions – awarded parsimoniously over the years – constitute an accelerator for the price indices of the artists that receive them?

The artist, according to Wassily Kandinsky’s time-honored expression, is ‘the child of his time’. So what could be more normal than to appropriate contemporary technologies, in addition to the images and ideas of one’s era. The boom of television during the 1960s awakened artists, in the United States as in Europe, to the possibilities of a ‘video art’. For nearly fifty years, artists have been exploring the many qualities video has to offer in terms of manipulating the image, narrative power and the temporal dimension.