Category: visual

“Four board members have resigned in protest. Several are threatening to rescind their contributions. Protest e-mails to museum officials have complained that an institution being built on public land and largely financed by taxpayers should not be named for an individual, no matter how generous.”

It is “a scholarly undertaking independent of the market. It is an analytical or ‘reasoned’ compilation of all the works created by a given artist. Unlike an exhibition or book, a catalogue raisonné is not a selection. It presents the full breadth of the artist’s accomplishment, with nothing left out.”

“Art is now judged by criteria that are fundamentally pretentious and empty. I suppose it has to be, or all the pretentious and empty art that sells in galleries would lose its value. “

“When you stare down at it from the steps of the City Hall in Paris, [François] Abelanet’s carefully designed garden resembles a terrestrial globe. It’s a nearly perfect sphere, with neat lines marking latitude and longitude … But move a little and its appearance changes. From any other angle, it’s an irregular crazy-quilt of shapes – a weirdly configured, Alice-In-Wonderland world.”

“The Miami model has prompted people to build and show their own collections. Privately run spaces can decide to close one week and open the next. But serving the public needs to be done in a universal way.”

“Faint and monochrome, the underlying portrait features strong similarities with two significant self-portraits dating to 1630, when Rembrandt would have been 24 years old.”

Language-based art demands all of the brain but doesn’t get much love in the art world, at least not from the big spenders. But it’s coming back into vogue.

Who wins the Guardian’s approval as architect of 2011? Someone who’s had a truly splendid year – and it’s not Frank Gehry, though he’s in the running too.

Nearly two decades of modernist sales from a supposed mystery cache come under fire in a case that includes prominent galleries, collectors — and even the FBI.

“The first thing to be recognised about Charles Saatchi’s Swiftian explosion of rage against the art world is that he is uniquely qualified to say it. The second is that broadly speaking, he is right.”