“The lawsuit is many things to many people: a footnote to the Picasso story, a historic art-world spat, and the latest example of museums joining forces to win legal confirmation that they own disputed works. But because of the vast research performed by the museums to establish the provenance of the paintings, it is also a privileged and ornately detailed glimpse into the lives of an aristocratic Prussian-Jewish family at the moment of its demise.”
Category: visual
How A Fake Gauguin Got Into Chicago’s Art Institute
“Had ‘The Faun’ been a print or drawing, there would have been more comparisons with known Gauguins. In sculpture, Gauguin research is slim, and the small number of available ceramics — about 50 are extant — compromises scientific analysis.”
Critics Question Mission Of Civil Rights Museum
The museum is on the site of Martin Luther King’s assassination. “Critics say that the board that runs the National Civil Rights Museum and its corporate members have too much power, and some community members feel shut out.”
Doing The Art Basel Math
The recent Art Basel was the biggest (art) show on earth. “More than 11,000 art dealers participated. If each of them presented five artists (and most showed more), that means there were in excess of 55,000 artists looking for a response from collectors, curators and writers. Plenty of these artists went home with nothing but silence.”
A Revisionist History Of Manhattan Architecture
“There are times when you walk through Midtown Manhattan, among the soulless slabs and towers of Modernism, and you wonder how an entire generation could have tolerated such unrelenting rectilinearity. Was no one bored? Was no one disgusted?”
England’s Hidden Public Sculpture Collection
Over 60 years, Arts Council England has collected more than 7,500 sulptures. But you can’t see more than one percent of them. Shouldn’t we find a way to distribute and make them accessible to the public, asks Germaine Greer?
Daniel Libeskind On Building The Modern Museum
“Money is not a determinant of architecture. If you give a poet more money, the poem he writes wouldn’t be any better.”
Building A Home For Architecture At Yale
Robert Stern “has transformed Yale’s Architecture School from a complacent institution that mirrored the likes and dislikes of its deans into a vibrant nexus of ideas and debate in which multiple views are represented and conflict encouraged.”
Basel Miami – $400 Million Of art In Four Days
“If Art Basel Miami Beach is emblematic of anything, it is the global stampede of art tourism, and the weirdness of what happens to art in that carnivalesque context of all that buying and selling.”
A Mediocre Year For New Architecture?
Was 2007 a mediocre year for new buildings? A nascent consensus in certain parts of the architecture world says so, and it’s not hard to understand why: