Category: visual

“Galleries that once changed only when works were loaned out are now subject to frequent renewal. For the first time, media other than painting and sculpture appear frequently throughout the Barr galleries. Artists who never quite made it into official “schools” are getting more play, and schools that the museum once passed up are getting pride of place.”

“Striking workers at the Canadian Museum of Civilization have mounted an outdoor exhibit near their picket line, spoofing an international show poised to open at the institution.”

“Brushes,” which allows users to paint on the white digital canvas of an iPhone screen or iPod Touch using their fingertips, hit the app store in August 2008. Sales soared earlier this year after artist Jorge Colombo designed The New Yorker’s June 1 cover art using the application.

“Ryan Trecartin, a young Philadelphia painter and sculptor whose psychedelic, desultory, kitschy video work has found love among critics and collectors, has been given the first $150,000 top award in the Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts – one of the richest art prizes in the world.”

Do “all objects identified as accessioned museum specimens have to be kept in perpetuity, even when they have no discernible meaning? The problem is particularly acute in a university…, where objects are primarily used for teaching and research rather than public display.”

“[In] a strange twist of history, just as the avant-garde art banned by the Soviet regime was viewed again, Socialist Realism, discarded so quickly in the late ’80s, may be going though its own renaissance. At least, that is the hope of the Jeschke-Van Vliet Art Gallery, located where the Berlin Wall once stood 20 years ago.”

In one self-portrait made after the death of his wife of 42 years, “the artist is unrecognizable. He presents himself as a befuddled, perplexed married man” transformed by his loss. In another, “his face now seems to melt before us, the one eye left intact looking heavenward. What sound is coming from his abject, open mouth?”

On the NYTimes.com “Room for Debate” page, four observers consider the questions: “What does the care devoted to the visual details in a packed lunch suggest about the culture? Why is such value placed on aesthetics in everyday life in Japan?”

Klaus Biesenbach, 43, is “a former curator who has remained an adviser” to P.S. 1. Biesenbach, who “for the past three years has also been MoMA’s chief curator of media and performance,” said he wants “to start a real dialogue between the two institutions yet keep very distinct programs.”

“Maybe if they would do their job . . . and spent some time looking for the art instead of being accusatory of the person who had it stolen, they might actually find it,” said collector Richard L. Weisman, who added that, on the advice of his lawyers, he would not speak to the police.