Category: visual

There are probably as many reasons as their are artists making art. But what does making art mean from a historical perspective?

“Hospitals are places of extreme drama: death, injury, birth and the saving of life are hourly occurrences. This is not reflected in the art that ends up in them. The emphasis seems to be on calm – few, if any, of the works loaned by Paintings in Hospitals seem to tackle the churning existential questions that must clamour in the heads of so many in hospital.”

“As the first phase in an expansion plan that could take 15 years to complete, the $90 million Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building suggests a modest future for one of America’s great museums. It complements the gorgeous if somewhat stiff main building, yet it also sends out timid signals.”

A new apartment building in San Francisco puts paid to the idea that there’s nothing new under the sun. The building “has a square, 50-by-50-foot facade with floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding glass doors, all shaded by the exterior louvered blinds. Above the ground floor, a four-story high, 12-foot-wide light well spanned by glass or metal bridges, cleaves the middle of the structure, front to back. It is a remarkable addition to the streetscape.” More importantly, it’s functional, allowing homeowners to create uniquely beautiful combinations of light and shade at the push of a button.

“The St. Louis Art Museum has paid about $10 million for ‘The Milliners,’ a circa 1898 oil painting by French artist Edgar Degas, making it one of the most expensive works of art in the collection.”

Harvard has returned a pre-revolutionary Orthodox Church bell to Russia. “The repatriation comes amid calls from countries such as Egypt, Italy and Greece, seeking to return artworks from overseas. The Orthodox Church has enjoyed a rebirth since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.”

“The Smithsonian Institution yesterday named Kevin Gover, a lawyer and former Interior Department official with no museum experience, to succeed W. Richard West as director of the National Museum of the American Indian… [Officials said that] Gover’s lifelong work with Indian nations qualified him for the job.”

” A controversial painting removed from display last week at the Cleveland Clinic includes depictions of blacks that many employees viewed as racially stereotypical, Clinic officials said Monday. Numerous employees at the Cleveland Clinic complained last week about the painting, ‘My Home Town,’ by Cleveland artist Michelangelo Lovelace, who is black. Lovelace, in turn, said last week that he had been censored when the Clinic replaced the work with another of his paintings.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever made this complaint before but The Art of Lee Miller, a centenary celebration of one of the most famous women in surrealist art that is about to open at the V&A, would be better if it included more nude images of the artist.” The exhibition of Miller’s photography “would be a better, less prissy experience if it were more ready to acknowledge that Miller’s body was what made her central to modern art in the age of Picasso, Cocteau and Man Ray.”