Category: visual

“Picasso never had to explain that his mistresses weren’t actually cubic, but [Viktor] Deak has taken grief over as little as a flexed knee.” Such is life when you’re a high-profile paleoartist. “If you find yourself face to face in a museum with Homo habilis, Australopithecus afarensis or Paranthropus boisei, you may be looking at his work. Many of the images of hominids in the new Hall of Human Origins at the American Museum of Natural History are his….”

“Vandals have splashed red and green paint onto the back wall of the controversial modern museum, the Ara Pacis, in Rome. They also left a toilet outside and several rolls of toilet paper. The museum, designed by the American architect Richard Meier, was opened in 2006…. Many criticised the building, in Rome’s historic centre, as too modern, too large, and out of character.”

“Over the past decade, small controversies occasionally unsettled the museum world, but they went away quickly, and few gained enough traction to become national issues.What happened? Was it a cultural or historic change? Self-censorship or a more subtle shift in what museums were exhibiting? Did audiences grow up, or were they just inured to radical art and provocative historical revision?”

“The Museum of Fine Arts has won a lawsuit it filed to establish its legal title to a valuable 1913 painting by Oskar Kokoschka. The judgment in US District Court for the District of Massachusetts seemingly settles a dispute that began in 2007, when attorneys for Claudia Seger-Thomschitz, an Austrian woman, demanded the return of the work from the museum.”

“Perhaps not since John F. Kennedy, whose dusty portraits can still be seen in kitchens and barbershops and alongside the antique beer cans at bars like Manuel’s Tavern in Atlanta, has a presidency so fanned the flames of painterly ardor among hobbyist and professional artists.”

“There isn’t enough sex in the arts today. Look back at the 20th century and the whole point of modernism was to liberate the carnal.”

The curator for Canada’s representative “realized she would have less than a year to raise more than $600,000, a figure that soon swelled by more than a third thanks to a weakening Canadian dollar, leaving [artist Mark] Lewis to sell artworks in order to help fund the Venice project. To make matters worse, the global recession was sapping many donors of their philanthropic impulses.”

“There is, obviously, the fact that the Mona Lisa is, technically speaking, a very great work of art. But is that really obvious? Well, it would be if we could still see the thing. Unfortunately, like the dollar bill and the American flag, it has assumed a pall of such impenetrable familiarity that we no longer see it at all.”

“The complaint alleges that the Warhol Foundation’s ongoing catalogue raisonné project and Authentication Board have for two decades fraudulently rejected legitimate works to artificially limit supply and thereby increase the value of Warhol works held by the foundation.”

“Cultural institutions have been on the defensive for decades, poorly firefighting accusations of didacticism, elitism, colonisation and looting, with ill-thought through mumbling and evasion. Now more than ever, museums need to stand up for themselves. For instance, several North American museums were recently rocked by claims from countries including Italy that objects in their collections were acquired illicitly.”