Category: visual

“Collectors have realised that you can still buy the best of their work, whereas the best Monets and Picassos are mostly in museums.”

“St. Vincent’s Catholic Medical Centers last week lost its bid to plant two huge towers in New York’s Greenwich Village — at least for now. In the same neighborhood, New York University wants to add millions of square feet. Can the Village’s intimate streets and squares survive the onslaught?”

Jed Perl: “There is art. There is life. For all I know, Rauschenberg’s has been a life well lived. As for his art, it stank in the 1950s and it doesn’t look any better today.”

Jack Shafer takes issue with the laudatory obits for artist Robert Rauschenberg. “His critics discover triumph in his every groan and belch because, as they write, his work was about invention and reinvention and experimentation and possibilities!”

“In an overflowing salesroom at Christie’s, bidders from all parts of the globe were happy to pay top dollar Tuesday night for everything from an abstract canvas by Mark Rothko to a painting of a monumentally fat woman by Lucian Freud. The auction also included a five-bedroom Modernist house, which was snapped up for a record price.”

“James Wood, chief executive of the J. Paul Getty Trust, held extensive staff meetings Tuesday to go over a streamlining plan that has eliminated 114 jobs and some programs to yield a 25% budget increase in its core arts programs.”

“Harvard Art Museum leaders have quietly held open houses and attended community meetings to make sure Cambridge residents approve of their latest multiyear project: reshaping the Quincy Street quarters that currently house the Fogg Art Museum and Busch-Reisinger Museum.”

“For the first time in many years, the Turner Prize shortlist looks to me like a dud. First, the four shortlisted artists struck me as unusually – and irritatingly – similar.”

“Fitzrovia is a tucked-away enclave of the West End sandwiched between the bustling retail stores of Oxford Street to the south and the traffic of the Euston Road to the north. For years it has been associated with small-scale fashion wholesalers. Now the rag trade is giving way to the art trade.”

“This is a Turner Prize shortlist without an even moderately big name on it. In recent years we had Mark Wallinger, Jim Lambie, Grayson Perry and the Chapman Brothers. This latest list also lacks clear distinctions of style, media or subject matter.”