Category: visual

“Several zoos across the country now sell paintings done by animals. The Houston Zoo, for example, offers a $500 experience, in which you can sit and watch an orangutan make a painting just for you.”

“Herbert Vogel, an 82-year-old retired postal clerk, and his wife, Dorothy, 72, a former librarian, spent about 45 years and their life savings collecting Minimalist, Conceptual and post-1960s art. In 1992 the couple pledged more than 2,000 paintings, drawings and sculptures to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Now, having amassed more art than could be exhibited in most museums, they will distribute 2,500 more pieces to institutions across the country.”

“There are several reasons you might want to stage an unauthorized group exhibition inside the fifth-floor restrooms at the Museum of Modern Art: to attract attention, to poke a little fun at a powerful institution, to make a satirical point about the high-dollar commercial art world, to invite your friends to watch you pull off a good goofball stunt.” Such a show last week was, of course, “intended not so much for the fleeting moment as it was for the Web. “

The National Galleries of Scotland have been given possession of more than 50 paintings by 19th century Scottish painter David Roberts, works which many had feared would never make it to Scotland despite a collector’s bequest. “The six oil paintings and 51 watercolours and drawings [are] worth more than £500,000.”

The magazine Artnet recently published a rave review of a gallery show of the paintings of Walter Robinson. But Robinson is also Artnet’s editor, with the power to hire and fire the freelance reviewer in question. Geoff Edgers smells a conflict of interest…

“The National Museum of American History, closed for an extensive renovation since September 2006, will reopen in November.” The museum was originally supposed to reopen by this summer, but construction was complicated by the need to remove asbestos and lead paint from the 40-year-old building.

“More than 20 years after he unleashed the first wave of Young British Artists on an unsuspecting public, Charles Saatchi is to present a new exhibition of work by the next generation of YBAs. New Britannia is due to open in summer 2009 at Saatchi’s new London gallery.”

“Forget Corinthian columns: Today’s museums have features like green roofs – such as on the new wing at the Institute of Fine Arts in Chicago – or goats as part of the maintenance team, as at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.” In fact, going green is the hot new thing for museums, and we all know how the arts love the hot new thing.

“Sotheby’s Hong Kong auction of Chinese contemporary art brought in nearly $18 million on Wednesday afternoon… More than 100 works from the Estella Collection, which Sotheby’s has called the largest and most important trove of Chinese contemporary art, were on the block.”

Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria has a Van Gogh hanging on its wall that is fairly transparently not a Van Gogh. Still, it’s probably not a hoax, either, so what exactly does the gallery have? Germaine Greer is making the “completely mad” suggestion that it might just be a Rubens.