Category: visual

The “action comes as the [nonprofit Fresno Metropolitan Museum] is scheduled to auction its non-art property today, with proceeds going toward the $4 million in debt that led in part to the museum’s demise last month. … Museum officials have said they are negotiating over an auctioneer and a sale date” for the art in the collection.

“Here’s the contested rap on Pierre-Auguste Renoir: Following success at the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874, when he was 33, plus another decade’s worth of heady achievement, his paintings went steadily downhill.” After seeing a new exhibition at LACMA, Christopher Knight concludes: “Conventional wisdom is confirmed, not denied. Late Renoir is mostly bad Renoir.”

“The proposed arches, part of a ‘cultural trail’ through [east London’s Brick Lane] – immortalised in Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as ‘misconceived’ and ‘excluding’. Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse.”

Portrait painter Katie Musolff, the hotel’s second artist in residence, “will be given a studio and gallery space in the hotel’s lobby and a monthly stipend. Part of the goal of the program is to provide hotel guests and the public with access to an artist at work.”

“A year after the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted, on long-term loan, a pair of exceedingly rare portraits of a pre-Civil War black Philadelphia couple, another pair of similar portraits has surfaced in the city. Actually, they were all but hiding in plain sight.”

“With such pressing survival issues, is it appropriate to be thinking about architectural revolutions or questions of aesthetics?”

“The material encompasses documentaries, interviews and reports spanning nearly five decades of Britian’s most famous sculptor. It includes six classic programmes made by pioneering producer John Read for the BBC.”

“With a price tag of $450 million, the world’s largest steel structure has been called a potential white elephant, a big, expensive building that no longer serves a purpose.” Thus the snow park, “the latest effort to create a new life for the stadium.”

“The Transportation Security Administration has mandated that beginning on Aug. 1, all items shipped as cargo on commercial passenger airplanes — estimates are that as much as 20 percent of art shipped around the world travels this way — will have to go through airline security screening.”

“The human cost of Haiti’s worst earthquake in more than 200 years – at least 150,000 lives lost – has been well documented. But the disaster also struck a knockout blow to the heart of Haiti’s vibrant arts community. Several galleries were destroyed and thousands of paintings lost under the rubble of flattened government buildings and art museums.”