Category: visual

“Historic campus buildings and landscapes form an important part of the nation’s cultural patrimony. Campuses of high architectural quality, New Urbanist town planner and University of Miami architecture dean Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk says, have a big impact on students raised in unexceptional suburbs.”

Murder and mayhem are central themes throughout art history, from Titian’s “Flaying of Marsyas” and countless depictions of St. Sebastian riddled with arrows to Leon Golub’s paintings of death squads. However, gory board games are uncommon, if they have ever existed at all.

“Sooner or later the professional museum fatwa that treats these places as private curatorial archives and denies their governors freedom to trade collections must crumble. The crude chauvinism that says that a work of art must be ‘saved for the nation’, even if then buried by the nation, is the most arrogant of imperial leftovers. Art should be displayed.”

“Nauman, 66, who lives in New Mexico, was chosen by the Federal Advisory Committee on International Exhibitions, a group of arts professionals organized by the National Endowment for the Arts to advise the State Department.”

Chinese art is popular on the world stage right now. But the kind of Chinese art showing up in showrooms isn’t representative of the kind of art being made in China…

“I really kind of resent the way this investigation is being (handled) with all the bells and whistles. The press was there before the federal agents. We’re cooperative and we will cooperate always with any of these investigations. This is just a show, which I don’t appreciate very much. But as far as the details, you can be assured that we will cooperate with this investigation as far as anybody can go.”

“A dispute between [Boston’s] Museum of Fine Arts and an Austrian woman who says she is the rightful owner of a coveted 1913 oil painting escalated this week, with the MFA filing suit in federal court to retain ownership of the work.”

Considering all the drama surrounding the Russian art exhibition currently on view in London, one could be forgiven for wondering if the show was really worth all the effort it took to pull it off, including an act of Parliament. But several of the paintings have never before been seen in the West, and the Royal Academy expects half a million visitors over the next three months.

Architect Zaha Hadid has been tapped to design the new Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University. “Ms. Hadid, known for bold, unconventional forms, was selected last week in a competition that began in June, when the Broads gave $26 million toward the $40 million museum, which will house modern and contemporary art.”

“if three eminent German scholars are to be believed, the methods by which Michelangelo prepared for the epic struggle of painting the 300 figures on the chapel ceiling remains a mystery, and the drawings that are said to explain it merely mystify it. In a beautiful and weighty new book, Michelangelo: Complete Works, they insist that only a small minority of the drawings currently attributed to the master are definitely by him.”