Category: visual

“The tile mural was meant to depict a quaint Sunday in Boyle Heights. Many angry residents say it makes their neighborhood out to be a crime-ridden dump filled with fat women, stray dogs, beer-swilling men and illegal street vendors. And don’t get them started about the piñata.”

“Art Dubai, which runs from March 19 to 22, is part of the logic of cultural and capital expansion in Dubai’s seemingly bottomless ambition to be the best and most impressive in all realms: building, flying, engineering, international finance, and now, culture.”

Gordon Rintoul, director of National Museums Scotland: “A different, younger generation of directors was coming in; people like me who had loved museums as children, but whose aim now was to polish up their dusty image and bring them back to life. Today that’s even more necessary. Anyone running a museum now has to be much more entrepreneurial than 20 years ago.”

“Led by curators and scholars, the field of Latin American art has been redefined and revitalized in the United States, with the results visible on museum walls and auction-house tally sheets.”

“Designed by Frank Gehry, the project was a rare instance in which the architectural talent lined up for a New York project matched the financial muscle behind it. When it was unveiled in late 2003, it seemed to signal a genuine effort to raise the quality of large-scale development in a city still stinging from the planning failures at ground zero.”

“About 1,000 ancient artifacts found in a wealthy Italian’s country house outside Rome were stolen from one of Emperor Trajan’s 1st-century villas, archaeologists have determined.”

A London municipal council is trying to combat fake parking permits. “The council have used specially commissioned drawings by illustrators of local landmarks and events, which have been printed onto the permits making them difficult to fake.”

“Over the last five years, managers of art investment funds, which buy and sell a pool of works for a set management fee and a share of any profit made, have been keen to promote art as an alternative asset class. So far, the Fine Art Fund, started in 2004, is the only one of these vehicles that has remained conspicuously active in the West.”

“Spanish police and the FBI have dismantled a multimillion-dollar international art forgery ring which duped hundreds of customers into buying counterfeit prints of works purporting to be by artists including Picasso, Warhol and Dalí.”

“Stan Douglas has won the $10,000 Bell Award in Video Art for 2008, the Canada Council has announced. The prize has been awarded annually since 1991 for exceptional contribution by a video artist or artists to the advancement of video art in the country.”