Category: visual

“Dogs do what dogs do – and in Berkeley, ‘dog do’ is now part of some very public art. Decorative medallions depicting dogs sniffing, dumping and humping each other have recently been added to the base of one of a pair of sculptures commissioned by the city on either end of the pedestrian and bike bridge over Interstate 80.”

“One of the UK’s biggest pieces of public art is to be taken down after being blighted by safety concerns and a legal row. The £1.4m B of the Bang, outside the City of Manchester Stadium, has had problems since it was erected in 2005. One of its 180 steel spikes was dislodged within two weeks, and 22 have now been removed from the sculpture.”

“Cash donations for acquisitions can be expected to plummet, but gifts of art are less predictable. In good times and bad, artworks come to museums in various ways — from friends and complete strangers. And despite the gloom that descended last fall, 2008 turned out to be a surprisingly good year for local collection growing.”

“Three prominent museum-world figures who are Brandeis University graduates” — the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art; the chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s department of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art; and the director of Duke University’s Nasher Museum of Art — “spoke out vigorously on Tuesday against the school’s plans to close its Rose Art Museum and sell off artworks to raise money.” Their open letter is posted on the Rose’s website.

“Damien Hirst has defied the slump in U.K. consumer spending by opening a second shop in London. Other Criteria, the U.K. artist’s publishing and merchandising company, started the store this week at 14 Hinde Street in the Marylebone district. It sells works including some by Hirst himself ranging from his keyrings at 3.50 pounds ($5) to prints showing pills on mirror glass shelves, from an edition of 125, at 4,000 pounds ($5,800) each.”

“In the days leading up to Friday night’s [Institute of Contemporary Art] opening, Boston Detective Bill Kelley said, he was getting more and more complaints from residents of the Back Bay, the North End, and Mission Hill, furious that a man who admitted to spreading graffiti – even bragged about it – was being treated like a celebrity instead of a criminal.” The subsequent arrest of the suddenly ubiquitous Shepard Fairey “has left two unanswered questions: What is crime and what is art?”

“A battle over what constitutes ‘overtly sexual’ art unfolded on Long Beach’s trendy main thoroughfare on Monday, with an artist demanding that two of her abstract nudes be put back up on the walls of a public exhibition organized by a program that deemed them offensive. … The two paintings in question show women’s breasts, which the exhibition sponsors said went too far.”

“The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Johnnetta Cole, an anthropologist and former college president, as the new director of the National Museum of African Art. Cole, 72, made national headlines in 1987 when she became the first African American woman to lead Atlanta’s Spelman College, the country’s oldest historically black women’s university.”

The Museum of Modern Art’s “publicity campaign, one of the most ambitious it has ever undertaken in the city, will cover every ad space in [Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue and Pacific Street subway stations], spaces normally given over to plugs for movies, beer and podiatry treatments. In their place will be reproductions of works drawn from all parts of the museum, both well-known and more contemporary, by artists like Matisse, Hopper, O’Keeffe, Marlene Dumas, Cindy Sherman and Martin Kippenberger.”

“After $360 million of renovations, the gloomy fortress housing Alice Tully Hall and the Juilliard School in New York have gained light and sparkle. … The Juilliard building used to sit dourly on Broadway like a travertine-marble aircraft carrier.” Its sleek new appearance is “traffic-stopping, as it’s meant to be.”