Category: visual

According to police, a 53-year-old heroin addict “ripped off 39 paintings from New Haven venues, including $40,000 in art from Yale’s Slifka Center and the New Haven Free Public Library. The paintings were recovered during a weekend bust on a Hill area home, where a second man, age 47, had been allegedly accepting the art in exchange for bags of heroin.” A detective said: “These were not hardened criminals. They have drug habits.”

“Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum has named Christina Orr-Cahall its new CEO and director. Currently CEO and director of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., she will take the helm at EMP/SFM on or before July 1. Orr-Cahall will be taking over from interim CEO Josi Callan at a time when the museum is clarifying its focus….”

“Copyright lawyers have been arguing over Shepard Fairey’s appropriation of a news photograph of Barack Obama for his ‘Hope’ campaign poster and whether it constitutes ‘fair use.’ But no one has disputed that it is a work of art. But what about the photograph on which the poster is based?”

“Doctors and researchers regularly rely on CT scanners to create images of body parts like brains, chests and knees. But an artist-turned-medical-student in Manhattan is using one such machine to peer into the meat and guts of cultural icons like the Big Mac, the Barbie and the iPhone, creating whimsical and occasionally creepy images.”

“The J. Paul Getty Museum and the National Archaeological Museum of Florence, Italy, have entered into a long-term cultural collaboration that will bring one of the latter’s most important masterpieces and other significant works to Southern California, officials of both institutions announced today.”

In architecture, some might see the 1970s “as the lost decade – a hiatus between the fag end of postwar modernism and the Day-Glo joviality of 1980s postmodernism. The Twentieth Century Society, though, is bucking the trend, starting a campaign to raise awareness of the decade’s architecture…, and good for them. My childhood needs saving!”

“It is probably fair to say that Andrea Palladio, who died in 1580, is the patron saint of every McMansion that has ever cluttered the American landscape, because it was he who brought architectural aspiration to the houses of the moderately wealthy.” And yet: “If modern developers have used his treatise ‘The Four Books of Architecture’ as a mere catalogue of columns and cupolas for the upwardly mobile, Palladio isn’t to blame.”

“Sotheby’s cut Chief Executive Officer William F. Ruprecht’s salary by $100,000 to $600,000 for 2009 after the company’s profit dropped 87 percent last year. The New York auction house also eliminated Ruprecht’s cash bonus for 2008.”

“Exhibitors at the world’s biggest art and antiques fair reduced prices by as much as 30 percent as collectors hunted for bargains from dealers as well as auctions. Buyers at the European Fine Art Fair — Tefaf — in the Dutch city of Maastricht bought works by Lucio Fontana, Andy Warhol and El Greco, while some sellers said yesterday that they had increased discounts.”

“A once-sleepy museum has been reinventing itself as a 21st-Century institution worthy of a collection that experts rank among the top 10 at American universities. The expansion more than doubles the size of the museum, while bringing the original 1910 beaux arts building up to contemporary standards.”