Category: visual

“This awesome information technology that we are rapidly taking for granted is an arena that is apparently attracting artists who want to push the boundaries of what art can be. I thought the boundaries in art had all been crossed in the Sixties, or was it a century ago? Maybe I was wrong.”

The art event of the summer in the Hamptons was to be a show of Jackson Pollocks. But a distpute over their authenticity led to cancellation of the show. So… who really created the made these drip paintings?

“For generations, the art of preserving dead creatures has been considered at worst barbaric and at best a relic of 19th-century colonialism. Now, however, a new breed of artists and collectors are discovering taxidermy. A manky hoof or a moth-eaten fox head that once adorned your granny’s spare room is probably propped on the wall of an expensive restaurant. A new shop selling taxidermy is opening next year in London’s achingly fashionable Shoreditch. Kate Moss has just spent several thousand pounds on a piece of taxidermy sculpture – a dead bluetit on a prayer book – by the east London-based artist Polly Morgan.”

“Since its opening in 1977, the Pompidou Center’s Musée National d’Art Moderne has been counted among the world’s most admired and most visible museums of contemporary art, beginning with its startling Paris building, its outside walls industrially festooned with ducts and fixtures. But in some circles, the institution has also acquired a reputation as a place where bad things sometimes happen to borrowed art.”

Sotheby’s CEO William Ruprecht is riding high times at the auction company. “Will we have the top lot of the season? Who knows? In the first six months, we grew about twice as fast as Christie’s. But we’re not in a race with Christie’s. We’re not in the same game. We focus on the high end, not on the mass market. We don’t sell Star Trek memorabilia as a major part of our effort. We don’t do online sales. We brought that to the art market five years ago, and we ditched it. Guess why.”

Saskatoon’s Mendel Gallery has had ambitious plans for an expansion. It deserves to grow. But funding for the project seems always ready to come… next year.

Russian authorities are scrutinizing security at the Hermitage Museum after recent thefts. “As authorities announce the return of some of the Hermitage items, attention is turning to the glaring lack of control at Russian museums since the 1991 Soviet collapse. Security and inventory systems are antiquated, with curators often keeping records by hand in notebooks.”

That visitor at the Guggenheim is no ordinary patron. He’s been hired to be there. “Although all of New York’s major museums have educational programs, only the Guggenheim hires people to mingle full time in the galleries, interacting with museum patrons in all their quirky diversity.”

Arthur Erickson is Canada’s top architect. Greatness has eluded him, but why? “Erickson remains strangely disengaged from architecture as anything more than an exercise in aesthetics. In an age as ugly and coarse as ours, one is loathe to complain about an architect whose main preoccupation is beauty, yet even the most diehard connoisseur of buildings must admit they have a broader function, a larger social responsibility. The best buildings — and the most beautiful — transcend themselves in a way that Erickson’s rarely do.”

Artist Kent Twitchell has filed lawsuits over the destruction of his large-scale mural “Ed Ruscha Monument” that was painted over in June. The defendants, “the suit contends ‘willfully and intentionally desecrated, distorted, mutilated and otherwise modified’ the work. Twitchell has said he received no notice — as required by law — that the artwork, on a downtown building owned by the federal government, would be painted over.”