Category: visual

The city’s art teachers were set to use a new curriculum featuring the public TV series art:21-Art in the Twenty-First Century when “some teachers and parents [became] concerned that images they consider too disturbing or sexual for the classroom may be acceptable to some art teachers.” (Among those images are Sally Mann’s photos of her naked children.)

To celebrate the 100th anniversary of the subway system’s famous circle-with-bar symbol, the Tube has commissioned 100 artists to design posters based on the iconic emblem.

He told The Art Newspaper that the vision he presented to the “search committee consisted of adding intellectual heft to the Guggenheim, empowering the curators, and finding new ways to make the museum relevant, especially to younger audiences.”

“In its first curatorial hire since the death of longtime director Anne d’Harnoncourt, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has named Peter D. Barberie curator of photographs.
Although he comes from a post as lecturer at Princeton University, Barberie, 37, is something of an Art Museum insider.”

At the new California Academy of Sciences building, opening Saturday in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, “[e]very penny of its hefty $488 million cost is on view, gorgeously packaged by the Italian architect Renzo Piano. Its overarching messages are the essential role of evolution in the work of the natural sciences and the urgency of addressing global climate change. In Piano’s design, the medium is the message.”

“Its gleaming, angular facade makes it look – at a glance – like an enormous, glass version of a mangled tin can. But… this reflective giant could be about to displace the Guggenheim Museum as Bilbao’s main tourist attraction. Visitors to the Basque city are taking time out to make the 10-minute walk from Frank Gehry’s emblematic building to take in not an art museum, but rather the distinctly less glamorous headquarters of the Basque health department.”

“Patricia Stonesifer, a member of the regents since 2001, serves on its executive committee and has been a leader in reforming how the regents operate since the Smithsonian faced a severe crisis of management last year.” She formerly ran the $38 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

So writes Germaine Greer. “Everybody loves it when Hughes goes off on a rant about the schlock of the new, but he is too easily seduced into blaming the wrong people. A Hughes label is crafted to stick fast to its victim.”

The heirs contend that the judge was biased. “There is no justification for calling New Brunswick’s and the gallery’s greatest benefactor a ‘con artist ‘ who committed a ‘gargantuan fraud’ and was comparable to Goebbels,” say the heirs.

A new sculpture in a southern German town square has tourists snapping pictures and politicians arguing about the role of public art. The work shows Angela Merkel naked, along with other politicians, and the artist is unapologetic. He calls the work his “group-sex relief.”