Category: visual

“Physical experience makes a much deeper impression than a purely intellectual encounter. I can explain to you what it’s like to feel cold, but I can also have you feel the cold yourself through my art. My goal is to sensitize people to highly complex questions.”

“Members of the local Establishment, enamored with their smart new friends–collectors, artists, and curators from around the world–want to see if they can get them to stick around. It’s partly about wishing to be taken seriously as a cultural alternative to New York and Los Angeles. But it’s also a bet that fertilizing the creative class is good economic-development policy–especially in a city hit hard by the real-estate meltdown.”

If antiquities, whether the Diamond Sutra or the Elgin Marbles, form part of “our common heritage,” is it right to treat them as embodiments of some particular modern nationality, whether Chinese or Italian or Turkish?

“The cruel truth is that free museum entry has turned out to be a mixed blessing. Yes, the number of visitors going to galleries has increased dramatically, but the figures are not what they seem. A Mori poll conducted in 2002 discovered that, although numbers had increased, the make-up of the typical museumgoer had remained unchanged. What was actually happening was that the same people were going more often. And those people were, as before, the middle-class, the educated, the culturally involved.”

The museum abandoned its grand entrance in the 70s. Now it’s reopening. “The MFA has hauled in 110 blocks of granite – a quarter of the stone produced each year on Maine’s Deer Isle – to expand and resurface the landing in front of the doors, which first opened in 1915. Inside the Evans Wing, the museum is installing a new visitors’ center with retro ’50s-style furniture.”

“Security issues have thwarted attempts by the Louvre to borrow objects from Iraq for its major “Babylon” exhibition which opened last month and which will travel to Berlin and London later this year.”

The online store handled as many as 300,000 orders a year for the Smithsonian, according to the museum. The company that ran the online operations closed its operations March 14 with only hours’ notice to the Smithsonian.

“Heirs of Russian artist Kazimir Malevich settled a dispute with the city of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum, getting five paintings in return for the right to keep the remaining Malevich works in the city’s collection.”

“Blair sits uneasy and exhausted in a shadowy interior in Hale’s painting, in a dark suit and without a tie. The unbuttoned shirt is apparently a break with protocol for parliamentary portraits, but this portrait is unbuttoned in other ways too. Blair looks gloomily away from the artist, fixed on thoughts of his own; he doesn’t conceal age, or exhaustion, or care. It’s a melancholy rather than triumphal image.”

“Those who now say that New York is finished because the market is ruining everything need to get a grip. Several times in the past 40 years, New York artists faced oblivion. More bad art may be being made and sold now than ever before but each artist has to deal with what the market means to him or her in the privacy of their own studio.”