Category: visual

“Fans and prospective buyers turn to Banksy’s official website (banksy.co.uk) for photographic evidence of murals, and the second work in Liverpool does not appear online. However, the artist neither officially sanctions his murals online, nor signs the actual street works for fear of legal repercussions.”

Roberta Smith: “[It’s] a strangely hectic, occasionally informative and sometimes even insightful high-definition tour of the [UK] National Gallery exhibition, ‘Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan.’ … Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can’t say that it is entirely a promising debut.”

“Nabokov admired one. Chekhov cuddled with one. E.B. White wrote poetry to them. Gary Shteyngart tweets about one. (Also: Warhol had two. Picasso drew one.)” (And your humble correspondent was raised by dachshunds.)

“With Potts now coming aboard (he starts work in September), four talented museum people will have occupied the director’s office in the last 12 years. The turnover is not hard to explain. Alone among major art museums in the United States, the Getty’s director reports to a paid president, not to a board of trustees.”

A newly published study finds people are more likely to be moved and intrigued by abstract paintings if they have just experienced a good scare. This suggests the allure of art may be “a byproduct of one’s tendency to be alarmed by such environmental features as novelty, ambiguity, and the fantastic.”

“Karel Appel, a leading expressionist, died at 85 in 2006. He never recovered from the loss of a lifetime’s worth of drawings, sketches, notebooks and other works believed to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.” A logistics company found the trove while cleaning out a recently warehouse.

“The broken glass from an attack by vandals on the National Museum here has been swept away, and the remnants of the Buddhist statues they destroyed — nearly 30 of them, some dating to the sixth century — have been locked away. But officials say the loss to this island nation’s archaeological legacy can never be recouped.”

The artist and author, known for her painted story quilts, had been enthusiastic about the planned Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling attached to an affordable housing development in her old neighborhood. Then, two months ago, she cut all ties with the project, saying that the developers hadn’t provided for art insurance, security or storage. The developers counter that it’s too early in the process – construction hasn’t yet begun – to finalize such arrangements.

“Christo sits stone-faced as they call him a liar, a cheater, a con man, a killer, as they politely suggest he is a fool, as they angrily denounce him as an enemy of nature.
He is the world’s most famous artist and this is what he must endure for these odd projects he dreams up.”

“Architecture is also the stuff of construction, engineering, maths and science. Of philosophy, sociology, Le Corbusier and who knows what else. It is also, I can’t help feeling, harder to create great buildings now than it was in the past. When Eridu or the palaces and piazzas of Renaissance Italy were shaped, architecture was the most expensive and prestigious of all cultural endeavours. Today we spread our wealth more thinly.”