Category: visual

“The Resnick Pavilion is what museum curators have often claimed to long for–a well-lit, flexible white box that will enhance rather than do battle with the art inside.”

What recession? “Over the next two weeks, between $1.5 billion and $2 billion (£1.2 billion) is expected to be spent there on Impressionist, modern and contemporary art at auction. If the sales hit their targets, they will achieve the highest figures on record for a series of auctions.”

“Different fingers are used for varying effects, and even though he is right-handed, he often draws with his left hand, giving the final works a quality that he’d have difficulty replicating with his stronger arm. The results throws up questions about the very nature of “originals” and ‘reproductions’, and the value – aesthetic and monetary – of the work.”

“A vast new exhibition space opened in New York City this summer, with a show 18 months in the making. On view are works by 103 street artists from around the world, mostly big murals painted directly onto the gallery’s walls.” The show, called the Underbelly Project, is in one of the city’s disused subway stations: the art is literally illegal, and the artists – if found out – could be prosecuted for their work.

“Spending on architecture and building (not always the same thing) has fallen in real terms over the past 200 years. Where once buildings were the greatest, proudest and most expensive objects money could buy, today we spend on much else besides.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art’s $350 million expansion and renovation reached such a point earlier this month with the substantial completion of the 32,000-square-foot atrium skylight that will surmount the light-filled center of the dramatically enlarged institution.”

“Over the last generation it has swung far towards the contemporary; will it, or can it, swoosh back one day? The answer is bound up with economics, taste, supply and the global expansion of the art market.”

“Art Loop Open, the city’s first public voting contest, is over, and there is a winner: John Dempsey, whose painting — “The Great American Landscape” — has earned the local artist $25,000.”

“In 59 other countries including most of Europe, [artists] get a small percentage (from a fraction of one per cent to five per cent, depending on the sale price) of the hammer price of her resold painting thanks to a principle known as “droit de suite,” or the artist’s resale right.”

“Some observers say the government fears a backlash from nationalists that could reawaken anti-Semitism. Others say the country is not rich enough to return such property.”