Category: visual

“Bioartists create by engineering living tissue and even living beings, sometimes with controversial outcomes. At the forefront of this movement is SymbioticA, a bioart laboratory funded by the University of Western Australia.”

“UBS, Europe’s largest bank by assets, posted its first loss in almost five years in the third quarter, including $4.66 billion in markdowns on fixed-income securities and leveraged loans.”

It’s been a year since Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art opened. “What the ICA has done is bring visitors from all over the metropolitan area to a part of Boston they would otherwise not have gone. I think people now can touch and feel the potential rather than saying it’s just a place on a map.”

“In more than two dozen interviews on the floor of the Miami Beach Convention Center, gallery executives reported mostly brisk sales and said the contemporary art fair seems insulated — so far — from U.S. economic jitters.”

“Driven by an unprecedented global buying spree of everything from hot-ticket contemporary works to time-proven choices from Picasso to pop, works of art have become a de facto international currency in their own right.”

The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation asked a court Friday to declare them the rightful owners of two Picasso paintings that a Jewish scholar claims were the rightful property of a relative persecuted in Nazi Germany.

“The New Museum in New York works, and it works in part because its basic form suggests not just playfulness, but something supernatural as well. A mix of those two elements, an amalgam of brattiness and transcendence, silliness and the spiritual, would pretty much describe where the contemporary art world spends much of its time these days.”

Why doesn’t the Denver Art Museum make more of a fuss over its new acquisitions? “The museum is regularly acquiring significant works of art, and the public is simply unaware of them… It would be great to see the museum make a point of systematically announcing those acquisitions of a certain minimum level of importance.”

A Nova Scotia artist is painting a series of canvases focused on the Vatican in an effort to save a Halifax church. The church in question needs to raise $300,000 by next summer in order to avoid being folded into a larger diocese. The artist intends to paint 20 to 25 works in his charitable series.

“In a legal strategy that is spreading in the art world, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation jointly asked a federal court yesterday to declare them the owners of two Picasso paintings that a claimant says were sold under duress in Nazi Germany.”