Category: visual

First of all, there’s the on-again, off-again attempt by Italy’s new-ish nationalist government to make da Vinci and the Louvre show a cultural battleground. But there are also the perpetually uncertain status of loans from the Hermitage (again, politics), the fact that works on wood are too fragile to travel, and the mysteriously missing Salvator Mundi. – The Art Newspaper

“This is a sign of the times. Artists are understanding what audiences or the sponsors are drawn to and are looking for. They are looking for it to go viral or become an icon of that moment.” – Toronto Star

The buildings of Dr. Maya Angelou Community High School was drab gray and green until Saturday, when the artists got to work. “The Maya Angelou school project, which includes prominent artists such as the all-female collective ​Ni Santas, the artist known as Rabi of the collective Cyrcle and French artist JR’s Inside Out Project, has undergone rigorous planning during the last three years, organizers said. Students brainstormed themes for the artists to work with.” – Los Angeles Times

Aïda Muluneh once worked as a photojournalist for The Washington Post. That didn’t go perfectly. “‘Are you an artist, or are you a journalist?’ her boss asked.” By now, the answer is clear: “Muluneh’s art isn’t coy. It deals in high-stakes disparities: Africa as aspiration and Africa as abyss. Reconsider the continent, her images command, and they proceed to connect it to a genre-blending aesthetic that reconceives notions of place and otherness.” – The Atlantic

A board member made the announcement of her gift at a quasi-40th birthday party for the museum on Saturday night. That fits with new director Klaus Biesenbach’s vision. “‘We are not aiming at having more visitors or larger attendance, but we’re aiming at being more accessible, at having open doors,’ Biesenbach said in an interview. ‘As a civic institution, we should be like a library, where you can just walk in.'” – Los Angeles Times

On the night of the Whitney Biennial opening,” a crowd of over 150 activists gathered at the Whitney Museum for their largest action yet: a culmination of Nine Weeks of Art and Action, a protest series spearheaded by Decolonize This Place (DTP) to oppose Whitney vice chair Warren Kanders. In a surprise move, the protesters marched from the Whitney Museum to Kanders’s townhouse in Greenwich Village to end the night.” – Hyperallergic

Sebastian Smee: “What the sale of Koons’s “Rabbit” — an auction record for a living artist — is telling us with special force is that the question of valuation is not just about rationality or irrationality. It is, on a deeper level, redundant. It’s redundant because we are in a realm divorced from reality. Intentionally so.” – Washington Post

“This purist notion of artwork inviolably tied to its context, once a subversive strike against tradition and the marketplace, seems almost quaint now, as artists, dealers, museums and patrons interpret “site-specificity” in ever more elastic ways. The phrase itself has been co-opted as marketing speak in recent years: “site-specific” might even steal the crown from “curated,” the reigning art-world term applied to everything from playlists to pop-up shops.” – New York Times Magazine

“Art that cost more than $1 million accounted for 40 percent of the market but just 3 percent of transactions. The disparity is most severe in the contemporary market, where living artists’ work is sold out of art galleries. In 2018, sales from the top 20 living artists accounted for 64 percent of the market. Bigger galleries, the top 5 percent in terms of turnover, accounted for more than 50 percent of sales. Sales at smaller galleries declined over the past few years.” – The New York Times

The six-painting series known as the poesie, commissioned by Philip II of Spain and based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were last displayed together in 1704. Five of them will be reunited and exhibited in London, Edinburgh, Madrid, and Boston in 2020 and ’21. (The sixth is in London’s Wallace Collection, which is forbidden to lend out its art.) – The Guardian