Category: visual

“One of the longest, most bitter and expensive legal disputes in Canadian cultural history has come to an end with an out-of-court settlement that confirms the Beaverbrook Art Gallery’s ownership of 85 artworks valued by some at more than $100-million.”

“The unlikely journey of 362 cuneiform clay tablets and plaques began in ancient Iraq as far back as 2030 B.C. But they would pass through modern Dubai and Newark, survive a government seizure and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, before finally winding up back at their birthplace, fittingly, almost nine years to the day after 9/11.”

“The art world has a love-hate relationship with visibility, entertainment, and anything populist. It claims to be open but relentlessly polices its borders for anything as alien as this show was bound to be. Yet Bravo had me at hello. The show appealed to my belief that art only got better once the boundaries between high and low culture were relaxed, most famously by Andy Warhol, then by countless others.”

“In a surprise development in the battle over whether museums should be allowed to sell art to cover operating costs, the New York State Board of Regents on Tuesday approved the expiration of emergency regulations regarding such ‘deaccessioning’ on Oct. 8.”

“Designers now face a tough Catch-22: reliant on a market that needs us to buy more, but operating in a world pleading for everyone to use less – a paradox captured by that Apple iPhone, which looks as perfect and as indestructible as anything designed by the godfather of minimalist product design, Dieter Rams, but is outdated in a matter of months.”

“Especially in a proud city like ours, you shouldn’t have to search so hard for evidence that the history of art — and of Boston — continued past the turn of the last century. Where are our leading corporations in all of this? Where is City Hall?”

Rogers, a Briton who, hired by the MFA in 1994, raised $504 million for the whole revamp, considers it so meaningful, in fact, that he changed his nationality: “When I embarked on this wing, I became an American citizen, because how could I expect people to invest in it if I did not have a stake in it?”

“Has architecture rediscovered its conscience? Or is it just critics and curators who have had a reawakening, suddenly paying attention to design work that has been going on steadily, and right under our noses, for years?”

“Tennessee Attorney General Bob Cooper has unveiled a proposal that would remove the renowned Stieglitz Collection from the campus and install it in the Frist Center for the Visual Arts. The university, meanwhile, is revising its proposal to sell a half-share in the collection to an Arkansas museum for $30 million.”