Category: visual

“Board members for the Fayetteville Museum of Art plan to quietly dissolve their 40-year-old organization as early as this week, an official said Monday.”

“Make what you will of Marxism, this was a historical moment when ideas mattered, and when geometrical abstraction was the new universal language. Architecture today is personality driven, participating in the competitive logic of the market, fueled by rivalry, intensely professionalized and most often serving private clients.”

“Cardinal Sin is a bust [of a priest] with its face sawn off and replaced by blank tiles, designed as a response to the child abuse scandal in the Catholic church. In a statement, Banksy said: ‘I’m never sure who deserves to be put on a pedestal or crushed under one’.”

“Despite the art market’s vulnerability to shocks, including the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, when unrealistic estimates left scores of unsold lots amid tepid bidding even in the red-hot Chinese ceramics market, Asia’s rapid wealth accumulation is likely to result in more cash flowing into art and other alternative investments.”

“They found the culprit on a 65-metre-long outcropping called Craig Rhos-y-Felin, near Pont Saeson in north Pembrokeshire. It lies approximately 160 miles from the Stonehenge site. The question remains though, as to how neolithic people transported huge chunks of rock from Wales to Wiltshire, some 5,000 years ago.”

“Last month, identical bills were introduced in the House and Senate that would create the Latino museum as a new branch of the Smithsonian Institution. The bills, sponsored by nine senators and two House members, among them four Latinos, calls for establishing the museum in the Arts and Industries Building, a vacant, 130-year-old historic structure on the National Mall.”

“The bill, which amends existing copyright law to provide for America’s first nationwide royalty on sales of visual art, calls for funneling half the proceeds to a new federally supervised fund that would help nonprofit museums buy artworks by living, U.S.-based artists.”

“Unlike cities such as Salzburg, which are lucky to display the Baroque in small clusters, Prague opens the Baroque onto the visitor like the spread of an eagle’s wings.”

Art dealers in Great Britain aren’t best pleased with a law that gives heirs of artists a percentage of resale money, but heirs say the dealers’ protests “sound like a load of nonsense.”

The Knoedler Gallery, embroiled in a $17 million lawsuit about one painting, refunded $2 million for a different supposed Pollock in 2003.