Category: visual

“A Met trustee since 2001, [real estate developer Daniel] Brodsky, 66, has served on important committees, including those for Finance and Buildings. He is also a trustee of New York City Ballet and New York University.”

“You have to look at it with a painter’s eye, rather than a gardener’s eye. … It has the straight lines [typical of French gardens], but it also has natural, soft plants. I see people leaning down and expressing wonder over a simple pansy, taking photographs. They would never do that in a public park. Because it’s Monet’s garden, the poetry takes over.”

“The problem lies with the whole notion of the ‘blockbuster’, which is just a desperately hoped-for money-spinner for cash-strapped galleries.”

“A neurobiologist at the University College London scanned volunteers’ brains as they looked at 28 pictures. Works by Botticelli and Monet caused increased blood flow to areas of the brain that are usually associated with romantic love.”

“Western art has frequently stumbled over the contradiction between the ascetic figure of Jesus of Nazareth and the iconography of Christ inspired by the heroic, Hellenistic ideal: Christ as beautiful, tall and broad-shouldered, God’s wide receiver … The poor and ascetic Jesus likely was small and thin and almost certainly olive-skinned, with black hair and brown eyes, and so Rembrandt painted him.”

“What about his art? Is it even any good? Well, though Weiwei himself came to denounce the Beijing Olympics as a “PR sham” hiding China’s “disgusting” political reality, his stadium was a big hit, its twirling trusses suggestive of a bird’s nest or woven basket of Chinese yore.”

“The art, left by American Indians thousands of years ago, was the target of graffiti vandals in November. Areas as large as 9 feet wide were covered with maroon spray paint, apparently for the shock value of the damage, police said.”

“Photography is a kingdom of glamour and banality. The photograph, whatever its cultural pedigree, does not so much exalt the everyday as establish the aesthetic parameters, the peaks and troughs, of everydayness. The camera may record astounding events or reveal shocking truths, but always within the context of the ordinary, the literal, the real.”

“The first of the museum’s rotating exhibitions will feature about 108 selections by the famed abstract expressionist artist, including 60 canvases, 45 works on paper and all three of his sculptures. Also on view will be letters and other highlights from Still’s archives.”

“Called simply the Gulbenkian, the £175,000 award is worth more than four times the Turner Prize and outstrips the US-based ArtPrize, previously the world’s largest, at $250,000 (£153,000).”