Category: visual

“What, exactly, does it mean to call a painting “great”, let alone the “greatest”? If greatness in art has any meaning it is at odds with an opinion poll that throws it open to the people’s choice. If greatness exists it must be objective and absolute and therefore not ours to vote for. Greatness suggests a world historical significance, a sublimity. It has nothing to do with competition.”

“The key fact is his self-invention as a painter, entering art history from essentially nowhere, as if by parachute. Never having had traditional lessons to unlearn (unlike Picasso, with his incessant industry of demolishing and reconstructing the inherited language of painting), Matisse innovated on something like whim—a privilege, without guidelines or guarantees, for which he paid a steep toll in anxiety. There is even a touch of the naïf or the primitive about him, though it is hard to grasp, because his works quickly assumed the status of classics, models of the modern.”

Switzerland’s new SFr110m (£48m) Paul Klee centre, designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, has opened in Nern, Switzerland as a focal point for study of the semi-abstract artist’s life and works.

So Costco is selling Picassos online. “But no one seems to remember that what Costco is doing is nothing new. Forty years ago, Sears, Roebuck & Co. was selling Picassos and Chagalls, not to mention Rembrandts, Dürers, Goyas, Whistlers, Mondrians and Wyeths, all of them bearing the imprimatur of a celebrated connoisseur who was better known for making such grisly movies as The Fly and House of Wax.”

“We were outraged at what happened and more so at what’s continuing to happen at the sites. Numbers of impoverished Iraqis are willing to pillage for antiquities in order to feed their families. It’s 200 people a night with equipment. Look at Umma: It’s like a lunar landscape [from the digging.]”

What’s happened to Los Angeles? It suddenly has a center. “Downtown LA, previously considered a cultural wasteland, has emerged as a cultural centre: an arena for the more mature works of some of LA’s, and the world’s, finest architects, as well as for the architecture of the next generation.”

“The same year he declared art history to be over, Arthur Danto became The Nation’s art critic. With no dominant movement to champion or art-historical future to prophesize, he redefined art criticism as the ‘first post-historical critic of art’.”

The Barnes Collection has just completed its first-ever professional assessment of its collection. “An in-depth study of the foundation’s collection has determined that perhaps as many as two dozen of its Old Masters, while still old, aren’t quite as masterly as Dr. Albert C. Barnes was led to believe when he bought them.”

The LA Times weighs in on matters Getty. “The Getty has long held an exalted place in the art world, with its diverse collections, incomparable setting and unmatched wealth. But these most recent disclosures show the foundation to be exceptional in an entirely different way. They bring back unpleasant memories of the tales of corporate greed earlier this decade, when it seemed that every scandal could be traced to an ‘imperial CEO’ and his all-too-compliant board.”

Rachel Cooke hates the pointless exercise of a poll to pick the “best” art in Britain. “I am thoroughly sick of lists, but this one takes the biscuit, being neither a true reflection of public taste nor the result of hours of debate by a committee of learned experts. What happened was this: the public voted, then their choices were whittled down by a ‘panel’ consisting of art critic Martin Gayford, society portraitist Jonathan Yeo, and dancer Deborah Bull.”