Category: visual

“A doorman who works across from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art found a painting outside his building and kept it for weeks, then realized it was a missing work at the center of a bizarre legal web and turned it in to investigators this week, an official said.”

“The $91-million building is emblematic of a rich new phase in museum design, which continues to be a surprising bright spot for architects otherwise struggling through a dismal couple of years.”

“This gigantic show put up by 80 galleries from Europe and America mirrors better than any event on the world scene our new approach to art. Perception is changing. Interest in subtle nuances is receding as our attention span shortens. Awareness of this trend probably accounts for the recent art trade emphasis on clarity and monumentality and the striking progression of 20th-century modernity.”

“New City Hall was architecture that imagined something wide open and worldly for a collective consciousness. When it opened in 1965, the city was instantly rebranded.”

At one time hosting an estimated 1,500 pieces of wall art, Los Angeles is the nation’s mural capital, but that’s a fading distinction thanks to prolific graffiti taggers, a legal morass over classifying the artworks as illegal signs, and neglect.

“A £25,000 visual arts prize rewarding the best in a genre that has been slightly overlooked in recent years – figurative art” went to Patricia Cain for “Building the Riverside Museum, a pastel work exploring the construction of the new Zaha Hadid-designed museum on the site of a former Clyde shipbuilding yard” in Glasgow.

When Corot’s Portrait of a Girl disappeared this past summer, “Carl Haggerty claimed he got drunk and lost it after showing it to a prospective buyer.” The entire world said, Yeah, right; lawsuits were filed; criminal investigations began. It turns out Haggerty was telling the truth.

“Notoriously nervous to clean its most famous Leonardo, the Louvre has collaborated with the Labor atoire du Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Musées de France and the European Synch rotron Radia tion Facility to perform a quantitative chemical analysis on the Mona Lisa, 1503-06, and the faces of seven other works by the artist.”

“In the two weeks since a fire destroyed offices and damaged galleries in its original house, the Phillips has managed to open a new exhibition, keep to its original date for a string quartet concert later this month and proceed with another major exhibition in October.”