Category: visual

“[T]he City Council and other agencies of local government should base their decisions not on what is best for Broad but on what best serves the public. And they should approve this deal.”

“Beginning Monday anyone with access to a video camera and a computer will have an opportunity to catch the eye of a Guggenheim curator and vie for a place in a video-art exhibition in October at all of the foundation’s museums” via a project that’s “open even to entrants who don’t consider themselves artists.”

“This annual addition to the summer season [in Kensington Gardens], in its tenth year, has produced many things – Rem Koolhaas-s tethered balloon, Frank Gehry-s explosion in a lumber yard – but it has never before seen a red plastic playground. It’s very plastic and very, very red.”

The Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, opening next weekend, “is one of the largest in the United States and rare in its focus on temporary, site-specific commission. ‘We’re resisting this tendency in the last few decades to collect giant sculptures and then try to keep them forever outside,’ [the park’s curator] said. ‘These things have lives to live and at a certain point will be retired’.”

An Australian government report has concluded that “art is a collectable and should not be counted as an investment that boost[s] retirement savings. … If implemented, the estimated $100 million [Aus] invested in art by self-managed [pension] funds each year would be lost.” Artists, dealers and auction houses are reportedly “quite outraged.”

“[Albert] Barnes believed that in old age Renoir achieved a rare mastery over form, light, and color. Even more heretical, he considered Renoir to be a wellspring of modern art, on a par in his influence on younger artists with his friend Cézanne … Many critics, scholars, and collectors have rejected this apotheosis, and still do.” This summer, you can visit two exhibits in Philadelphia and decide for yourself.”

“Seeking to create a new gallery for sculpture and decorative objects, the Frick Collection is planning to enclose in glass the portico on the north side of its Fifth Avenue garden.”

Several lawsuits brought by disenchanted buyers accuse “Park West [Gallery] and its founder, Albert Scaglione, of selling fake, forged and overpriced artwork and using phony appraisals and certificates of authenticity. Scaglione denied the allegations and said the negative publicity is killing his business.”

“The 72-year-old Yorkshireman thinks that the iPad’s ability to share images will also have profound effects, both artistically and politically. ‘As it empowers more and more people to distribute their own images it weakens the older suppliers of images and perhaps governments as well.'”

“More than a third of the art didn’t sell, which dealers and art consultants attributed as much to Salander’s habit of buying in bulk — indiscriminately, some say — as to European economic turbulence.” Art dealer Lawrence B. “Salander, 61, who pleaded guilty in March to a $120 million art fraud, is free on $1 million bail.”