Category: visual

“Art that turns spectators into performers has been around since before Joseph Beuys, ditto art that tries to eliminate the material object”. But is “a new theatricality is emerging in contemporary art?” Unlikely…

The temple, named Ventarron by the team of scientists that uncovered it, includes murals and a staircase that leads up to an altar, likely used for fire worship.

The museum’s head-to-toe renovations mark the most sweeping reinvention of the DIA since it moved into its original beaux arts-style building on Woodward in 1927. Nearly every square inch of the museum has gone under the knife.

“After 11 years of steep growth in the value of fine art, the drop in Sotheby’s stock by about 37% in the course of one day sounded alarm bells. Analysts were particularly struck by the fact that Vincent van Gogh’s landscape, Wheat Fields, possibly his last finished work, painted in 1890 two weeks before he committed suicide, was left unsold; Sotheby’s had valued it at up to $35m (£17.5m).”

Three weeks ago, the British Museum quietly launched its comprehensive website of what it calls flat art: mostly so far its enormous collection of prints and drawings. The drawings, 50,000 of them, have all been catalogued; the prints, by no means.

“The dedicated Saatchi room will be in the General Staff Building, former government offices in Palace Square which are being restored to provide a home for the Hermitage’s collection of 19th to 21st century art.”

“Leonardo Da Vinci left clues to a 40-second musical composition in his painting, Giovanni Maria Pala said. Each loaf of bread in the picture represents a note, he said, which combine to sound ‘like a requiem’.”

At New York’s Lever House lobby at Park Avenue and 54th Street, “viewers will confront a veritable Noah’s Ark of roadkill — 30 dead sheep, one dead shark, two sides of beef, 300 sausages, a pair of doves — that the British artist Damien Hirst describes as his most mature piece.”

Europe’s leading museum or not, the Prado’s new section, including its exhibition of 19th-century Spanish paintings from Francisco de Goya to Joaquin Sorolla, is a must-see.

Rising star architect David Adjaye’s design for Denver’s new Museum of Contemporary Art is a fresh take on museum design. In “a mere 27,000 square feet spread over four levels, he methodically inverts long-held ideas of how museums — especially contemporary art museums — should work.”