Category: visual

The anonymous and always controversial UK graffiti artist known as Banksey is putting a self-portrait up for auction this month. If past experience is any indication, the winning bidder should probably be prepared to endure some abuse from the artist, who has said that he can’t believe anyone would pay money for his work.

The Netherlands isn’t really interested in what you think of its eye-popping but decidedly non-trendy architecture. It’s too busy making more. “This idea of unmodern architecture has been fiercely debated in the Netherlands in recent years. Since the mid-1990s, an increasing number of Dutch architects and other Europeans with commissions in the country have been struggling, with occasional success, to find a new voice for Dutch buildings – an antidote to the safe, flat neo-modernism that steals all those pages in the magazines.”

An art installation at a Vancouver gallery is drawing fire from animal rights activists, who claim that renowned Chinese artist Huang Yong Ping is mistreating the live animals used in the exhibit. The piece in question consists of “an array of creepy crawlies massed together under a turtle-shaped enclosure,” which the local Humane Society says is “deliberately designed to spur aggression among the animals.”

“The Colombian artist Doris Salcedo will be the first artist from outside Europe or North America to undertake the challenge of the annual Unilever commission in Tate Modern’s vast central space… All her art is underpinned by a sense of the history of justice. But at the same time, it is very quiet. It’s not about sending out direct messages, though she is a very passionate individual.”

The U.S. State Department’s Cultural Property Advisory Committee “has been the focus of fierce battles between archaeologists, who say the art market fosters the looting of historic sites, and dealers, who say that broad import restrictions threaten collecting by private individuals and museums in the United States.” The debate has taken on a particularly desperate air lately, as rumors swirl that the committee may decide to acquiesce to a Chinese request to ban the import of Chinese antiquities.

“An embarassed Christie’s has been forced to withdraw a glazed ceramic sculpture of a boar from auction tomorrow after Grayson Perry, the cross-dressing Turner Prize-winning potter, told them that he had not made it. He said that it had to be a fake because it was too well made to be one of his early works.”

“The exhaustive Melbourne Design Guide is just one of many signs that this city’s global reputation as a cutting-edge design capital is swiftly in the ascendant. In architecture, graphics, industrial design, interiors, street art, craft, fashion and furniture, Melbourne is making its mark without apology.”

“Slink is part of a growing trend of anonymous street art projects. Last year, New Yorkers were puzzled to wake up to a number of artistic additions to their road crossings. Instead of the minimalist red and green men, the lit figures at pedestrian crossings were adorned with handbags, shoes, hats and complicated items of clothing. The endeavours clearly amuse, but their definition as art is hotly debated. What is the aim behind such works?”

“Francois Pinault emerged as the sole candidate to turn a disused Venice customs building into a contemporary-arts center by June 2009 after a rival bid by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation was thrown out for being incomplete.”

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts gave Herb Ritts his controversial first museum show 11 years ago. “The Herb Ritts Foundation announced it will give the museum $2.5 million, and in return the MFA will create a gallery named for the photographer. The foundation will also give the MFA 189 of the artist’s photographs, making the museum the largest holder of Ritts’s work.”