Category: visual

In the dark days of South Africa’s apartheid regime, poor black artists living in the township ghettos surrounding Johannesburg spent their lives creating work that no one asked for, and that the white minority ruling the country would never exhibit. But a few foreign collectors made a point of buying up what they could of the township art. “Now, in an unusual and well-orchestrated burst of generosity, these collectors are giving the art back to South Africa, helping to restore an important part of the country’s historical record.”

“It was the scandal that rocked the internet. A seemingly worthless painting sold on eBay in early 2000 for $135,805 — all because buyers believed it might be the work of the 20th-century abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn. It wasn’t. Nor was the story behind the painting true… Before long the tangle of deceits that led to the historic sale began to unravel on the front pages of newspapers around the country.” Now, one of the perpetrators of the hoax has written a book to lay out his side of the story.

“The J. Paul Getty Museum, aiming to deepen its collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens in his prime, has made its first major acquisition since the January arrival of Michael Brand as director. The work, ‘The Calydonian Boar Hunt,’ was painted on an oak panel, 23 1/4 by 35 5/8 inches, apparently in 1611 or 1612… Museum officials, who said they bought the work in late April from a London dealer, declined to disclose the price. But a smaller Rubens oil sketch of the same subject — roughly 10-by-20 inches, again on a wood panel — sold for $5.4 million at Christie’s London on Dec. 8.”

So what’s it really like in art school, and who, aside from art school students, cares? Trendy new films aside, are art school teachers really as flaky and married to ideology as they’re always portrayed? Are students really so vicious and unfeeling as to barbecue their colleagues in open session? Not often, says Christopher Hutsel, though he has some stories of his own. But the main distinguishing features of an art school may be the segregation of the design students from the budding artists. And then, of course, there are the comic strippers. No one gets them.

As installation art continues to get bigger and bigger, the tactical expertise required to erect it becomes ever more involved. “As art with high production values has become increasingly common, the role of the artist has evolved into something closer to that of a film director who supervises a large crew of specialists to realize his or her vision.”

Philadelphia is a city filled with historic architecture constantly on the verge of obsolecence, and preserving it without stunting the city’s growth has become quite a challenge. Case in point: the city’s array of old, outdated neighborhood hospitals: too small to be functional in a modern “health system,” yet of undeniable architectural import and aesthetic value. So what to do with the buildings? How about converting them to senior housing with federal money, thereby creating “the least antiseptic low-income housing project ever financed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.”

The chandeliers at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House are big and impressive. Unless, of course, you’re speaking on a cosmic scale, in which case they’re actually just little sparkly things. Compared to, say, the Big Bang, the chandeliers are pretty infinitesimally small, and one might wonder why one would compare the two at all. But that didn’t stop artist Josiah McElheny from trying to represent both in a single glass sculpture.

As Tate Modern overhauls the way it presents its collection to the public, critics are beginning to assess the impact of the changes, not just on the Tate, but museums in general. “The wow factor is important to Tate Modern and key to its success, most obviously through the giant works that have held court in the gallery’s Turbine Hall. This is the challenge facing the gallery: to continue to attract all those casual visitors whose imagination has been captured by some of the contemporary shows on display, while also providing for more regular users of art galleries who rightly demand rigour and a certain level of scholarship on their visits.”

A unique art gallery devoted to so-called “outsider art” opens this week in Scotland. The gallery’s founder, a former art therapist, says that she intends to showcase what she calls Art Extraordinary: “‘visionary imagery inspired directly from the unconscious’. Many of those who produce it suffer from mental illness, but by no means all. Some are simply recluses, making art in private with no intention of showing it to anyone else.” The gallery will be the first of its kind in the UK.

It seems like we’ve been hearing forever about the imminent rise of Berlin as a global center of contemporary art, but the city has never really taken the final steps necessary to compete with heavyweights like New York, Paris, and London. But this year’s Berlin Biennial may finally be serving notice that the scene is ready to be seen alongside the world’s best.