Category: visual

“The Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, to give it its full title, is a significant addition to the Mexican art world, providing 3,300 sq. m of gallery space, which its chief curator, Guillermo Santamarina, plans to fill with large-scale international exhibitions, installations and Mexico’s largest public collection of contemporary art.”

An exhibition in Sydney examines how the thousand-year-old book has inspired visual art ever since its inception. “The empresses and higher court ladies had the tale read to them and at the same time they would look at paintings accompanying the story. It is assumed this tale was illustrated practically right away.”

“A jury of artists, politicians and city planners voted in favour of the reconstruction of a Prussian palace [the last residence of Kaiser Wilhelm II] in Berlin yesterday, just as the last remnants of the East German parliament building on the site were being dragged away.”

“Two paintings belonging to the late Montreal art dealer Max Stern that were stolen by the Nazis just before the start of the Second World War were returned yesterday to his estate at a ceremony in Berlin… Yesterday’s restitution is the latest victory in a continuing attempt by the Max Stern Art Restitution Project, started in 2002 at Montreal’s Concordia University, to locate and claim more than 400 artworks that once belonged to Mr. Stern or his family.”

“The Getty today announced it has acquired — for the proverbial undisclosed sum — the 1617 ‘Wilderness With the Temptation of St. Anthony’ by Flemish master Roelandt Savery (1576-1639)… The acquisition has taken nearly two years to complete.”

“On the eve of a planned Sotheby’s auction of three documents related to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harry Belafonte, the singer and a friend of Dr. King who owned the papers, withdrew the items for sale… After news reports early this week about the auction the King estate released a statement condemning the sale and saying that it believed the documents had been ‘wrongly acquired’ by Mr. Belafonte.”

Filmmaker Ahsanullah Moni has built a life-size replica of the world’s favorite mausoleum in a small town about an hour from Dhaka, the country’s capital. Moni “said he wanted his countrymen to experience the beauty of the Indian monument even if they were too poor to travel to see the original.”

“Should we consider “Brought to Light: Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900″ an art exhibition just because the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has organized it? It surveys photography’s extension of human visual capacities, primarily in the hands of scientists, and it presents us with some pictorially striking images. But artistic intent figured in few, if any, of them.”

The Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End is entering the final phase of a two-year renovation and expansion. “‘Our timing could not have been better,’ Blazwick said with relief. In 2004, when the economy was still robust, she was able to secure about $5.4 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund for the expansion, seed money that encouraged others to give as well. She said the Whitechapel had raised all but about $735,000 of the nearly $20 million needed.”

“The same week that Mark Leckey was announced winner of the Turner Prize 2008 Matt Small and JR scooped top prize at the first ever Street Art Awards. Last night, at the end of an evening of urban bazaar-style partying, Small was announced winner of the urban art category, while JR won the street art section. To an outsider street art and urban art may seem like the same thing. But delve a little deeper and you will notice that street art is public and is usually done outside, whereas urban art is private and is usually done inside. It’s not a question of different aesthetics, rather a question of different production ethics.”