Category: visual

Tate Modern has entered into an extensive partnership with investment bank UBS, under which the museum will showcase works from the bank’s extensive art collection. But as much as Tate Modern may need UBS’s money, doesn’t such a deal indicate a betrayal of the museum’s core mission? “Tate Modern belongs to the British people. Its space cannot be sold, its codes must not be breached simply because the government doesn’t care to support it as it should.”

“Museums from the Louvre to the Guggenheim are currently engaged in exchanges with the Chinese.” But Canada is way ahead of the curve on Chinese art, and various Canadian museums have spent years building mutually beneficial relationships with Chinese art institutions.

“Colourful ‘stencil’ works on inner-city streets have made Melbourne a globally renowned hub for the controversial art form. But as debate rages in local councils about what constitutes graffiti, and how to prevent it, a festival is aiming to expose stencil art to new participants.”

“The J. Paul Getty Museum inched a step closer to relinquishing ownership of one of its most prized artifacts, a 2,400-year-old statue of a goddess claimed by Italy, at a conference of international experts to discuss the artifact this week.”

Auburn University’s Rural Studio, which began as a group of devoted and socially conscious architecture students building highly creative low-income housing, has become something much more dramatic in the five years since the death of its founder. “The students, most of them undergraduates, still design and build private homes for people below the poverty line, but they have increasingly shifted into large-scale public projects.”

“What exactly do you do with a $30,000 diploma from cartoon college?” That’s the question facing the first graduating class at Vermont’s Center for Cartoon Studies. “Graphic novels and comics are one of the fastest-growing sectors of publishing… But it’s a tough business to break into.”

As downloads eclipse CD sales, the artists whose work graces the covers of albums are scrambling to adjust to an uncertain digital future. The album cover as a monolithic concept may be on the way out, but there appears to be limitless potential for new ideas and innovations.

“As the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation gears up for its 70th anniversary next month, its officials have been pondering its legacy.” Steps are being taken to preserve that legacy, notably the designation of more than 600 works as core items in the collection, not to be sold or transferred for any reason.

“A sea change in the art market was stunningly apparent last night at Christie’s sale of Impressionist and Modern art, where most of the buyers spending millions of dollars on everything from stark Giacometti sculptures to dreamy Signac landscapes were mainly Europeans taking advantage of the weak dollar. While the prices may have seemed high to the Americans in Christie’s packed salesroom at Rockefeller Center, the successful European bidders acted as if they were getting bargains.”

“It undoubtedly counts as font fetishism, design geekery, Mac zealotry and any number of unappealing, sub-obsessive-compulsive habits, but I’m going to declare it anyway: I love Helvetica. … And this year, though surely it is shaped from the geometry of eternity, Helvetica is 50.”