In connection with the Royal Ontario Museum exhibit “Fakes & Forgeries: Yesterday and Today,” Discovery shows us faux ancient artifacts alongside the real thing and discusses how to tell the difference.
Category: visual
Is Second-Guessing Curators The Job Of An Art Critic?
“I find most exhibitions quite interesting, but often wonder if they could have been done another way, or used a different theme instead. If critics actually expressed these feelings, very few exhibitions would get positive reviews. But wait a minute: I’m a critic and it’s my job to express my doubts – isn’t it?”
Online, Users Of Museum Sites Morph Into Curators
“While museums have been experimenting with the Web for years, these projects have often consisted of little more than an exhibit photo gallery or online guestbook. In recent years, however, the rise of social media has given Web users the technological wherewithal to play a more active role in shaping the direction of museum collections.”
Hub Of L.A. ’60s Art Scene To Be Reborn (Temporarily)
“Los Angeles’ Ferus Gallery helped to nurture the talents of such artists as Ed Ruscha, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz. From 1957 to 1966, the gallery, which was located on La Cienega Boulevard, served as a hub for the city’s nascent postwar art scene. … Starting Feb. 9, the Samuel Freeman gallery in Santa Monica will create a replica of the Ferus within its own walls.”
Tapestries Crossed With Byzantine Mosaics, Made From Bottle Tops
They are “large hangings made of thousands of pieces of shimmering metal, stitched together with copper wire. They are astonishingly beautiful and not like anything done before. Some think of them as tapestries; [the artist, a Ghanaian-Nigerian named El] Anatsui calls them sheets. It is common to hear them compared to Byzantine mosaics, but the differences are greater than the similarities.”
Jeffrey Deitch Brings A Spectacle-Filled Résumé To MOCA
“More than a little art-world lore surrounds the 57-year-old mega-dealer with a business degree from Harvard and voracious appetite for the new, the hip, and, of course, the headlines. Over the last three decades, Deitch has pioneered, chased and cashed in on just about every art-world trend,” including “a failed attempt at reality TV and a brush with bankruptcy.”
S.F. Architecture Smackdown: De Young Vs. Academy
Architecture “must be judged by how it functions … not merely by how it looks or sounds or feels. And that’s why I’m not totally seduced by the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park – at least not in comparison to the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum across the way.”
Is There Any Such Thing As “Women’s” Art?
The effect of offering a sampler of the work of 200 women is to diminish the achievement of all of them. By lumping the major with the minor, and by showing only minor works of major figures, elles@centrepompidou managed to convince too many visitors to the exhibition that there was such a thing as women’s art and that women artists were going nowhere. Wrong, on both counts.
The Doge’s Palace, With The Grime Removed
“Venice’s Palazzo Ducale has been restored by experts, who cleaned marble facades and uncovered hidden shades of colour and gold.”
‘The Complexity And Creepiness Of Giacometti By Way Of Wes Craven’
“‘As others take in vagrant cats,’ the critic Max Kozloff once wrote, ‘Ida Applebroog’s pictures keep home for family alarms and little butcheries’. It “seems to delight her no end” that much of her work “cannot be reproduced legibly in a family newspaper, and, in fact, takes a little delicacy even to describe in such a newspaper.”