Category: visual

“The canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years, during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.” But if there were a select group of artworks chosen to define the whole of the New York art experience over the past 40 years, what would make the cut?

“David Hockney’s gift of the most ambitious of his recent landscape paintings to the Tate proves once and for all what a great national treasure this man is. … Hockney’s big paintings of woodlands in the changing seasons have a bounce that’s totally different from anything else in the entire history of British landscape art.”

“The Venice Biennale appointed Daniel Birnbaum, the rector of the Staedelschule international art academy in Frankfurt, to curate its 2009 show.”

David Hockney wants his massive gift to London’s Tate Modern to serve as a model for other high-profile artists to start giving their work away to the institutions that helped them along early in their careers.

“After the success of the last Berlin Biennial – called Of Mice and Men, and with a curatorial team led by artist Maurizio Cattelan – [at least one critic] was nervous that this latest, called When Things Cast No Shadow, would disappoint.” And there’s no question that Berlin 2008 is different, less spectacular. But it succeeds, nonetheless.

“Renowned UK artist David Hockney has donated the biggest painting of his career to Tate Britain in London. The work, Bigger Trees Near Warter, is 4.6m by 12m (40ft by 15ft) and is made up of a grid of 50 small canvases. The portrait, of a typical Yorkshire landscape, was first exhibited last year at the Royal Academy. It will be displayed at Tate Britain in 2009.”

“For the first time in decades, there appears to be a chance that a half-acre terrazzo road map of New York State from the 1964-65 World’s Fair — an exuberantly overstated mix of small-town parochialism, space-age optimism and Pop Art irony — will be conserved as the valuable artifact it is.”

“Fisk University said Thursday it will appeal a judge’s order to display an art collection donated to it by painter Georgia O’Keeffe… In March, Nashville Chancellor Ellen Hobbs Lyle permanently banned any sale of the 101-piece collection and set an October deadline for Fisk to retrieve the artwork from storage and put it on display.”

Architect and educator Ralph Rapson, whose stark, modernist structures defined an era of mid-20th century American design, died last week at age 93. “Rapson’s career, which included scores of houses, churches and performing-arts centers, mixed triumph and disappointment.”

Spanish painter Antonio López García is 72, and yet somehow is only just now having his first solo museum show in the US. “In Spain, he is the acclaimed realist who has a commission to paint the royal family. Here he’s virtually unknown.”