Treviso, September 2013. In 2012, the Louvre received more visitors than the Vatican and Mecca put together, two contemporary art museums opened on the banks of the river Huangpu in Shanghai, and the global art market reached 64 billion dollars, four times the size of the market for recorded music. But at the peak of its popularity, art still mystifies: visitors to museums and galleries of contemporary art typically spend about two seconds in front of each work of art, and eight seconds reading each artwork’s caption.

COLORS’ newest issue Looking at Art, out in September 2013, throws light onto the mysteries of the art world. What distinguishes a conceptual masterpiece from a bit of urban debris? A renowned painter from a commercial designer? Is copying allowed in art, and if so, says who? Who actually makes the objects we admire? How do you teach it, buy it, sell it, steal it, and what makes an acrylic-on-canvas painting a safer investment than gold?

From the million dollar shark caught by Australian fisherman Vic Hislop for UK artist Damien Hirst, to marble busts carved in a small Tuscan workshop for the world’s biggest contemporary artists and foreign dictators alike. From the Egyptian antiquities of the Greenhalghs, the UK’s most prolific forger family, to gigantic bronze statues by Mansudae Art Studio, North Korea’s #1 atelier. COLORS #87 reveals the fig leaf commissioned to hide David’s package, a watercolor camouflage techniquethatsaved Afghanistan’s paintings from the Taliban’s morality police, and the truth about the Mona Lisa, who may owe her popularity not to beauty, but to a crime committed one hundred years ago.

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COLORSis a monothematic quarterly magazine founded in 1991 under the direction of Oliviero Toscani and Tibor Kalman. It is now published in six bilingual editions (English+Italian, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese and Portuguese). COLORS’ editorial offices are located in FABRICA, the Benetton Group communications research centre, where an international team of researchers, editors, art directors and photographers work with a network of correspondents from every part of the world.

www.colorsmagazine.com

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