Category: visual

“Plagiarism and authorship are prickly topics, particularly in the fine arts. If an artist does not physically make his or her own work, then what does that mean for the nature of art, and for the status of the artist? What is the difference between the person who conceives of the work, and the person who crafts it; between artist and an artisan? Is it helpful to distinguish art from craft?”

“In planning and executing an exhibition, when is it OK for a nonprofit art museum to forge ties with a profit-seeking art entrepreneur? Roger Gastman, hired as the show’s associate curator, has both ironclad credentials as a historian of street art and a clear commercial interest in it via R. Rock Enterprises.”

There are porcelain plates, both sincere (a pattern at once garish and genteel in that peculiarly English way) and sardonic (plain white with the words “It should have been me”). There are pre-packaged pies and commemorative sick bags, coffee mugs and shot glasses. And there are specially branded prophylactics (“Crown Jewels – condoms of distinction”).

“The Libyan conflict has halted the creation of a museum of Islamic art in Tripoli, due to open in September to celebrate the anniversary of Colonel Mua­m­mar Gaddafi’s rise to power. The acquisition of exhibits was underway and pieces are known to have been bought from London auction houses over the past three years.”

“Once again, art museums allow themselves to be used. We were used for someone else’s agenda,” said Kaywin Feldman, president of the Association of Art Museum Directors and director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “What happened wasn’t about this exhibition. It was complete homophobia, and we have to stop putting up with that.”

“A fabulously vibrant Picasso painting of his young lover Marie-Thérèse Walter that has not been seen in public for 60 years is to be auctioned in London. Christie’s said it was selling Jeune fille endormie on behalf of the University of Sydney, which will put the £10m-plus it is expected to make towards scientific and medical research.”

A new book “contains three different forms of classification. The first section is a chronological catalog of 142 [innovative] office chairs … The second is a taxonomy that charts the development of different parts of the chair, including the headrest, backrest, armrest, seat, stem and base. … A third section is devoted to milestones in the movement of office chairs.”

The nonprofit institute Architecture for Health in Vulnerable Environments (ARCHIVE) is building prototype homes for Haiti designed to reduce tuberculosis transmission in Haiti and new housing engineered to keep out malaria-bearing mosquitoes. “The goal is twofold: to demonstrate an association between design features and good health, and to prove that healthy homes are affordable on a mass scale.”

“Archaeologists working on the temple over the past few years have issued a flood of announcements about new discoveries of statues. The 3,400-year-old temple is one of the largest on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor, where the powerful pharaohs of Egypt’s New Kingdom built their tombs.”

“Chagall arrived in Paris in 1911 at age 24. … Like many poor artists in Paris and a few writers, he soon rented a cheap apartment and studio in La Ruche (the Beehive) at No. 2 Passage Dantzig in the rundown slaughterhouse district near Montparnasse on the Left Bank.”