Category: visual

There was a time when top jobs at museums were more or less off-limits to women, but a survey of today’s art world shows that the glass ceiling has long since shattered, and to good effect. “Women are especially prominent at the nation’s top tier of modern and contemporary art museums… Directors point to women’s long history of involvement in museum-dom, the culmination of decades of institutional advancement and greater diversity on the boards of trustees that hire directors.”

“A new exhibition of Wassily Kandinsky’s work shows how the artist used his synaesthesia – the capacity to see sound and hear colour – to create the world’s first truly abstract paintings… There is still debate whether Kandinsky was himself a natural synaesthete, or merely experimenting with this confusion of senses in combination with the colour theories of Goethe, Schopenhauer and Rudolf Steiner, in order to further his vision for a new abstract art.”

The Baltic Arts Center in Northeast England is under investigation. The gallery has “threatened legal action against conceptual artist Chris Burden in an attempt to recover costs of £100,000. Questions have also been raised about a £175,000 commission by former Turner Prize winner Antony Gormley, who now serves as a Baltic trustee. The two cases provide an unusual insight into the financial arrangements between artists and public galleries, which are usually shrouded in confidentiality.”

“An artist virtually unknown in the world of art, Linda Hartough is considered the country’s most distinguished painter of golf — and yet even that distinction characterizes her work too broadly. Ms. Hartough paints golf landscapes — the azaleas of Augusta National, the tall grass of Shinnecock Hills and St. Andrews, the contours of Carmel Bay at Pebble Beach. Golf balls, putters and Phil Mickelson or a surgeon in midswing wield no interest for her.”

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts has unveiled a major expansion, and officials are hopeful that the ability to display a larger percentage of its collection will elevate MIA, which has always been considered a respected midsize institution, to the rank of top U.S. museums. “The new Target wing designed by Michael Graves is devoted to 20th-century art. There also are many more galleries for non-Western art, including six new Japanese galleries and one for art from the Pacific Islands.”

The largest privately held collection of Japanese art outside of Japan is being split up and donated after its owner’s death to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mary Griggs Burke’s well-known collection is 900 pieces strong, and has long been coveted by museums around the U.S. The announcement comes as the Minneapolis museum is unveiling its new expansion, which includes a major increase in gallery space devoted to Asian art.

The Bureau of Land Management, which manages the 1.9 million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, is trying to send a cautionary message to a growing number of visitors who are loving some ancient settlements to death. ‘We’re starting to call them the ‘accidental vandals.’ They lean on the walls to get a good picture. They take a corn cob with them, a pottery shard’.”

“Architects are living in one of those all-too-brief moments in which the world seems to be swimming with fat wallets — cities, Middle Eastern oil states, capitalist dictatorships — with the means and the egos to indulge in fantastical visions.Not in Britain, naturally. We prefer to get our visionary fantasies in the sale aisle at Matalan. No, it’s in China, of course, and Dubai, but also in culturally adventurous continental Europe, and even in the once architecturally cautious America, that experimentation is flourishing.”

The drawing was discovered in France in February. “No one is ever going to put a name to this face. Its owner lived before writing, agriculture, or towns existed, before there were states that kept records, and long before a Greek man named Herodotus decided to write something called “history”. The only reason we can be sure the people who painted in caves during the Ice Age were as human as we are – that is, they used their brains in the same way we do – is that they made art. No other animal makes art. And now the earliest art has a human face – literally.”

For the first time, the British Museum is keeping its doors open until midnight to accomodate the crowds wanting to see a special exhibition. “More than 140,000 people have visited Michelangelo Drawings: Closer to the Master, since it opened at the end of March. Now the 247-year-old museum has decided to stay open until midnight every Saturday until the show closes later this month.”