Category: visual

“A display due to go on show to the public at Tate Modern tomorrow has been withdrawn after a warning from Scotland Yard that the naked image of actor Brooke Shields aged 10 and heavily made up could break obscenity laws.”

“Every movie studio, theater, music house, publisher and publication in China is either directly owned by the state or subject to state guidelines. Contemporary art … is a bright exception. The sector has thrived in part because” of the Communist Party’s “willingness to let at least some flowers bloom.”

“The Smithsonian American Art Museum is expected to announce Thursday that more than 50 [Norman Rockwell] drawings and paintings from the private holdings of [George] Lucas and [Steven] Spielberg will be shown at the museum next year. … One of the exhibition’s themes will be the connections between Rockwell’s art and the movies.”

When the Seattle Art Museum “opened a glistening glass-and- metal-paneled, $86 million addition in January 2007,” it couldn’t have foreseen the demise of its partner in the expansion, Washington Mutual. In retrospect, compromises it made to accommodate the doomed lender offer lessons in expansion for the Museum of Modern Art and other institutions.

The new art center, opening next year, is at the Chateau La Coste winery in Aix-en-Provence and features a music pavilion designed by [Frank] Gehry, a wine cellar by [Jean] Nouvel, and other structures by [Renzo] Piano and Norman Foster.” Presiding is Tadao Ando, who “drafted the art center’s master plan and designed its 3,000-square-meter (32,000-square-feet) main gallery.”

“[S]ince being put up in Pioneer Plaza for display last December, God Bless America has become, by most estimates, one of the top public-art attractions in a city that believes, even with a tight budget, in buying and displaying art and boasts several superstars of the genre.” What does that say about public art?

“Craftsmen in India, China and elsewhere have been carving or writing on grains of rice and sand for years. But now a handful of artists are going smaller still, often applying the tools of nanotechnology to control matter at a molecular level.”

“The Albright Knox Art Gallery is scaling back again to help get through the economic crisis. It is now official. The Collectors Gallery, featuring local artists, will close permanently at the end of October.”

“The last self-portrait painted by Sir Anthony van Dyck, within months of his death in 1641, is to be sold by trustees of the family which has owned it for almost 300 years, and is expected to fetch up to £3m.”

“The Pop Shop, which opened at the height of Reaganomics in 1986 to sell branded T-shirts, toys and magnets, … closed in 2005 owing to rising costs, but the shop has been reconstructed as part of Tate Modern’s exhibition ‘Pop Life: Art in a Material World’.”