Category: visual

“The art district has become a thriving institution, but its commercial success has come at a cost. Formerly quiet alleys now throng with tourists and traffic, and most of the old workshops are now terrace cafes, boutiques and trinket shops. Sharply rising rents and tighter government controls have driven out many founding artists. Small studios have been replaced by big galleries – a sign, say critics, that commerce has supplanted creativity.”

Philadelphia’s Please Touch Museum is preparing to make a major move into its stately new home in Fairmount Park, and with the move will come other big changes. “Its annual budget will go from $4 million to $9 million, its exhibition space more than tripling to 38,000 square feet… All this, while pinning its hopes on nearly tripling attendance – to an average of 476,000 from 180,000 visitors per year.”

Giovanni Battista Zelotti was once regarded as one of the greatest artists of the 16th century, but scholars have largely ignored him in recent decades. “It didn’t help that until recently one of Zelotti’s greatest achievements — a cycle of 40 frescoes here at the so-called Castle of Cataio, about nine miles from Padua — was off limits to visitors.” But that’s all changing now.

“We saw this as an opportunity to develop key parts of the campus. We don’t have specific plans for the property. It was an opportunity to buy something, and we bought it. . . . We’d love a subway stop.”

“There is no central department for locating images by photographer, subject or theme for the artwork. But an online project, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, intends to change that.”

“Curators have traditionally been recruited as museum directors — for years they were pretty much the only candidates. But in recent times, as museums have come under pressure to increase attendance, expand their buildings and compete with one another for donors, their trustees and boards have preferred to hire leaders with management or business acumen rather than art training. Now curators are fighting back, eager to avoid seeing more businesspeople taking coveted directors’ posts.”

Ned Rifkin, the art historian, “who has held his position as undersecretary since 2004, said he timed his departure to coincide with the announcement of a new secretary of the Smithsonian by its board of regents as early as Tuesday.”

“Even while great – and likable – tracts of old Chinese cities continue to come tumbling down in the names of change and modernisation, the country’s up-and-coming practices are developing intelligent new forms of specifically Chinese design, even if they do draw from the west from time to time.”

The Getty has acquired “Arii Matamoe,” an 1892 painting by Paul Gauguin that has been in a private collection in Switzerland for decades and has been exhibited publicly only once since 1946.

“Stockholm’s Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts is seeking a benefactor who will buy its most famous painting and leave it hanging in the National Museum. The academy is offering Rembrandt’s The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis for 300 million kronor ($48.7 million Cdn), a discount from the $120-million estimated value of the painting.”