Category: visual

“Select banks and the two major auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, have been offering art financing for a long time. But in recent years, as values in the art market have risen, more and more collectors have taken advantage of it.”

“Yesterday this picture was worth millions of guilders, and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it,” he declared after his exposure. “Today, it is worth nothing, and nobody would cross the street to see it for free. But the picture has not changed. What has?”

“The vast majority of people don’t even enter art’s primary economy, the buying and selling of art, but they interact consistently with art’s secondary economy, the viewing economy. We don’t pay for art; we pay for the right to see it. And mostly, we pay very little.”

Germany has long been funny about its relationship to local stardom and to the very notion of celebrity. “It’s the reverse of America. You can openly be an intellectual elitist here, but materially you must act the same as everyone else.”

Researchers have taught computers how to “read” paintings and identify them. “A picture, after all, is more than a thousand words. It can be represented as bits of data, just like a bank account or music on a compact disc, and the researchers have sifted this information through the dispassionate filter of statistics. The authors… are quick to say that they don’t want to replace art historians. Their methods aren’t sophisticated enough to do so even if they wanted to.”

The painting is now in a “serious but stable condition”, curator Jorge García Gómez Tejedor said in yesterday’s El País. It does not yet need to be restored but it should not be moved, he said.

“Many of the significant gifts we’ve had in our history have come from fractional gifts The new law has virtually stopped new fractional gifts from being started. It’s a real problem for us and other museums.”

An exhibnition of art from the Kingdom of Benin puts work on display that was plundered primarily by the British more than 100 years ago. So is this art likely to be returned to its original owners?

“What if 30 people got together to buy themselves space in a Jeff Koons? Cemeteries are among the last urban green spaces. They need to be sculpture parks. Forget zombies from the ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I’d like to see people playing chess among the tombstones, kids skipping rope or texting their friends.”

“The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. There are many young, good architects in China. The unanswered question is whether our cooperation, this internationalization, will result in a common language of architecture, whether we will speak two different languages or whether there will be a mixture of the two.”