Category: visual

“The name of the pub is the Flying Duck. The name of the night is All The Young Nudes. It is a life-drawing club. Every Tuesday, for two hours, around 50 people gather here in a back room down a back lane with sketchpads and cans of cider. This is, perhaps, the only bar in Glasgow where a Stanley knife taken out and laid on the table implies not a threat of violence but an intention to sharpen one’s pencils.”

Richter “probably numbers among the least eccentric painters in the world. While working, he wears his sleeves crisply rolled up. He applies his paint very deliberately, and he concentrates on the canvas in a keenly focused manner. Indeed, while painting, he looks more like a self-composed surgeon than an artist striving for self-realization.”

“The trouble with Jean Cocteau was the breadth of his talents: poet, playwright, performer, filmmaker, sculptor, painter and musician. Celia Bernasconi, the director of the new museum, says that that’s exactly what turned the French against him.”

David Dawson: “Even though Lucian said he was not a creature of habit, the one thing he did do every single day of his life was get into the studio every morning. In our 20 or so years he did not miss a day, literally. And I had to be there first thing every morning, seven days a week, to prepare it for him.”

“Artists and art dealers around the country who have argued over the legal rights of artists to collect royalties in California have been chewing over a settlement this week between the collector Dean Valentine and the painter Mark Grotjahn.”

Just over a week after The Australian fussed publicly about how long it was taking the Art Gallery of New South Wales to hire a director, the museum has announced its choice for the job: Michael Brand, an Australian who was formerly director of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

Kevin Salatino, who has worked on the staffs of LACMA and the Getty and is currently director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine, will be the next director of art collections at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. Among Salatino’s claims to fame: of all his (very popular) lectures and gallery talks, only one has not referred to sex in the title.

“To pass through Grand Central Terminal, one of New York’s exalted public spaces, is an ennobling experience, a gift. To commute via the bowels of Penn Station, just a few blocks away, is a humiliation. What is the value of architecture? It can be measured, culturally, humanely and historically, in the gulf between these two places.”

“When, then, did pop art become mind candy, bubblegum, an uncritical adoration of bright lights and synthetic colours? Probably when money got involved, and Warhol was shot, never again to be as brave as he was in the 60s, or when Jeff Koons gave Reaganomics its art, or when Damien Hirst made his tenth million. Who knows? The moment when pop art sank from radical criticism to bland adulation is impossible to pinpoint.”

“As the art business continues to globalise, its growth depends upon making scholarship reliable and accessible. Because, in the end, the experts are the only candidates who can provide the adult supervision the market desperately craves.”