Category: visual

“Museum attendants should be stopped from ‘shushing’ children and displays should be hung low enough for youngsters to see properly, according to a manifesto to make museums more family-friendly published today.”

Brandeis University President Jehuda Reinharz on selling off pieces of the Rose Art Museum collection: “We’re going to take our time. We’re not unaware of the fact that the art market is depressed. It’s not like we were born yesterday. Everything is depressed. Housing is depressed. The arts is depressed. Everybody is depressed.”

Editorial cartoonist Dan Wasserman takes on poster artist Shepard Fairey: “I understand that we live in a world of rampant sampling and remixing, but claiming to be hip or leftist is not an excuse for ripping off other creators. It’s not even fundamentally a legal issue (though it may be that as well) — it’s respect for other artists. And the argument that the art is ‘transformative,’ so no nod to the original is necessary, is a weak one.”

“On buttons, posters and websites, the image was everywhere during last year’s presidential campaign: A pensive Barack Obama looking upward, as if to the future, splashed in a Warholesque red, white and blue and captioned ‘HOPE.'” Artist Shepard Fairey based the image on an Associated Press photo. “The AP says it owns the copyright, and wants credit and compensation.”

After a stint in the Getty Museum’s conservation labs, Francisco de Zurbarán’s 1633 Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose “is even more astounding than before: Surface textures emerged from beneath varnish, slight compositional alterations made the display of fruits and vessels more weighty, newly revealed details directed the eye in surprising ways, spatial relations were brought into a new light.”

“Sure, President Obama’s busy trying to solve the nation’s problems. But Megan McCluer and her husband, Michael Heffner, would like just a minute of his time to settle a mystery: As a young man, did he sit for a portrait painted by an obscure Los Angeles artist? And what’s up with the shirt?”

“While most other street or graffiti artists concentrate on adding their own imagery, illegally, to parts of the subway system, Poster Boy, a kind of anti-consumerist Zorro with a razor blade, a sense of humor and a talent for collage, has made his outlaw presence known all over the city by cutting and pasting the images that are already there in the form of ads.” Now police say they’ve caught him — but have they?

“A Degas sculpture last night fetched a record 13.3 million pounds ($19.2 million), while other high- value works were rejected, at the first international auction- house test of the art market in 2009. … This month’s evening auctions of contemporary art at Sotheby’s and Christie’s International are estimated by the auction houses to fetch at least 31.6 million pounds, a decline of 78 percent” from last year.

“L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art, which last week eliminated 20% of its paid staff to cut costs, is now faced with finding replacements for some of its highest-profile board members. Nine of the 35 trustees who were on the board last fall before the museum’s near-collapse have since resigned.”

41-year-old Luis Croquer, the quadrilingual son of a Venezuelan diplomat who comes to Michigan from the Drawing Center in New York, is taking over a two-year-old museum with no permanent collection of its own. “It’s a great privilege to be handed an institution at such an early stage in its life where you’re able to create the program and set the tone for the future.”