Category: visual

Taken together, their loss would amount to an editing of history, the forgetting and smoothing over of a vital period in British politics and architecture.

“If I extrapolate the trend for film sales and retirements of film cameras, it looks like film will be mostly gone in the U.S. by the end of the decade.”

“Piano’s Whitney needed to live up not just to his own immense portfolio but also to the array of 21st-century architecture clustered around the High Line, and to the museum’s current home by Marcel Breuer, one of New York’s most distinctive architectural achievements. Instead, he has capped the High Line with a pale, metal-clad tower, interlocked with a stack of horizontal blocks that step back in the manner of a clunky cruise ship.”

“Prices for the work of a variety of artists, including some top names like Larry Rivers, Eric Fischl and Francesco Clemente, have declined or stayed flat at auction in recent years.”

“Earlier this month, the wing was named the year’s “outstanding permanent collection new installation (or reinstallation)” by the Association of Art Museum Curators. Since the launch, MFA attendance has shot up by 50 percent. Admission and membership revenue have increased by 25 percent. And more than 7,000 tours of the new wing have been conducted by MFA curators and gallery instructors.”

As UniCredit has expanded through Europe, the bank has tried to become a leader in contemporary European art, with an active acquisitions and connissioning program (which includes loans to museums), a new €150,000 prize connected to the Venice Biennale, and a busy exhibition space at a flagship UniCredit branch in central Milan.

“The 660-year-old scroll, Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, is considered one of the masterpieces of Chinese painting … For decades a crucial section of the scroll has been sitting in a museum in mainland China, while the majority of the painting is on display at Taiwan’s National Palace Museum. Next week, the museums on both sides of the Strait of Taiwan will bring the sections of the scroll together for the first time in 360 years.”

A painting of the Virgin Mary holding the body of Jesus, a family heirloom now owned by a Buffalo-area man, has long been known to be a copy of a Michelangelo sketch. Until recently, scholars agreed that the painting was a copy, possibly by a student. But one historian is convinced that the canvas is one of only a few extant Michelangelo paintings on cloth – and he’s beginning to convince some of his colleagues.

“Giving a name to a work of art is, historically, a relatively recent phenomenon, and it is even more recent that artists provide the title. … No one knows when titles by artists became standard practice,” though it certainly wasn’t common during, for instance, the Italian or Dutch Golden Ages.

“My quick reaction is that the addition is less deferential — in same ways to its benefit — than it lets on, or would like to easily admit, or than it has seemed to some critics and observers. The block-like addition is sliced or folded back in a few places. But in scale and flinty personality, the new building is likely to thoroughly outmuscle the old one.”