Category: visual

Tracey Emin has been chosen to represent the UK in the next Venice Biennale. “She will be the second woman to produce a solo show for the UK at the Venice Biennale, following Rachel Whiteread in 1997. Andrea Rose, commissioner for the British Pavilion, said the exhibition would allow Emin’s work to be viewed ‘in an international context and at a distance from the YBA [Young British Artists] generation with which she came to prominence’.”

There are six buildings competing for this year’s Stirling Prize for architecture. “Today, the prize is as much a live TV show on the big night, staged against the backdrop of a black-tie dinner with wine and all the trimmings at a top celebrity venue, as it is a judgment on the state of contemporary British architecture.”

New digital prints of Walker Evans photographs raise some artistic issues. “A new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.”

“As late as 1920, Marcel Duchamp said he didn’t know what Dada was. The accounts of the original participants in Zurich are conflicting; there is even uncertainty about where the name came from. The most plausible version is that Ball and Huelsenbeck found the French word for ‘hobbyhorse’ accidentally in a French–German dictionary while looking for something else. Another possibility is that it came from the name of a popular hair-strengthening tonic. Whatever its origin, the word, which in several Slavic languages sounds like an emphatic declaration of agreement (“yes, yes”), quickly became as popular as a brand name: a one-word manifesto guaranteed either to amuse or to irritate.”

Artists ar taking to blogging to get the word out about their art. “In the process, artist/bloggers… are democratizing the art world, using the Internet to change the making and selling of art. Dealers and galleries, who command 50% commissions, no longer have exclusive control in defining who is emerging or successful. Now artists can sell directly to consumers, using blogs or auction sites at prices more affordable to would-be collectors. The result: More people are making a living as artists, more people are buying art, and more art is selling at a wider spectrum of prices.”

The San Diego Museum has returned a painting in its collection to Mexico. The painting, ‘Expulsion From the Garden of Eden,’ painted in 1728 by an unknown artist, was cut from a frame and stolen in 2000 from a church in San Juan Tepemasalco, in the Mexican state of Hidalgo. “Many questions remain unanswered as to how the painting ended up at the museum. No arrests have been made despite a two-year investigation into how the artwork was smuggled into the United States.

Since his World Trade Center tower project fell apart, architect Daniel Libeskind has move on. To Denver. “In giving Libeskind the freedom denied him in New York, Denver is taking a risk: Does Libeskind have the ability to design a building that will exert the magnetic pull of an icon and still work well as a museum? And can he set out a plan for an entire neighborhood, as he tried to do in New York?”

“The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History closes next month for almost two years of renovations, but some of the museum’s most beloved artifacts — Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Kermit the Frog, ‘Star Wars’ droids — will reappear in the fall. Beginning Nov. 17, 150 objects from the shuttered museum will be part of the “Treasures of American History” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.”

There is a plan in Paris to rebuild the Tuileries Palace. “No one has seen this handsome pile since it was torched by the Communards in 1871. For the past century and more the name ‘Tuileries’ has brought to mind not a building but a garden. Now, the French government is considering a project to put it back on the original site, opposite the Louvre, at an estimated cost of 300 million euros ($383 million). If the plan — which would be funded from private sources — goes ahead, it will by no means be unique. To a surprising extent, the monuments of Europe are not original, but reproduction.”

The Portland (Oregon) Art Museum has hired Brian Ferriso to be its new director. Ferriso is currently executive director and chief executive officer of the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.