Category: visual

“But despite all the polarized assertions, one question has lingered. Did Blu get paid for the mural that MOCA commissioned – and if so, how much?” (In fact, museum director Jeffrey Deitch says that MOCA itself didn’t pay the artist’s fee at all.)

At the Musée des Arts Forains in Paris, just go through the curtains at the entrance “and you find yourself flanked by a colonnade of four-metre-high horses … there’s hardly a ‘Don’t Touch’ sign in sight, fantasy vegetation crawls up the walls and you can go on the rides.”

“While marches of protest have been staged in Washington, D.C., and New York City, dozens of privately funded institutions and collectives across the country have obtained permission from The Estate of David Wojnarowicz (via New York City-based P.P.O.W., which has represented Wojnarowicz’s work since 1988) to screen ‘A Fire in My Belly’ on their own terms.”

“Are architects egomaniacs whose deepest ambition is to build monuments to themselves and their rich clients? Or is architecture really a social service, like that of a doctor, performing the job of healing the world and making it a better place in which to live?”

“The Louvre announced Friday that it had raised $1.3 million from thousands of online donors to buy a luminous Renaissance painting of three nude women that has never been displayed in public.”

A return of culture wars, a burst of helium in the auction market…

Guggenheim concedes: “Although this show will be presented “with huge integrity, I’m not sure we can ever convince everybody.”

“This fleshly mortality became especially real to Wojnarowicz in the still-emerging AIDS crisis of the time. Thus, by necessity it is a deeply human and deeply religious artwork. Christianity itself has produced some of the most gruesome images of tortured, dying, suffering, and dead bodies, especially Jesus’ own body.”

“The world-renowned architect’s plans for the $150 million[Aus] Dr Chau Chak Wing building, his only in Australia, were unveiled this week at the University of Technology, Sydney.” The business school building is “based on the idea of a tree-house structure. As Frank Gehry has put it, ‘a trunk and core of activity and … branches for people to connect and do their private work’.”

The Paris-born 48-year-old installation artist is the ninth winner of the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s award, “which recognizes an artist younger than 50 who has produced a significant body of work and consistently demonstrates exceptional creativity.”