Category: visual

“Artists, art dealers, galleries and auction houses should have a set of rules to ensure all deals are fair, a committee of MPs has recommended. And public money should not be given to artists or art institutions unless they sign up, the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee said.”

An attempt to clean and digitally photograph important tapestries from New York’s Cloisters becomes a puzzle only solved when sophisticated mathematicians crunch the billions of numbers stored in digital images. “Each pixel had to be calculated in its relationship to every other nearby pixel, a mathematical problem, known as an N-problem, big enough to practically choke [a supercomputer]. This was a math problem similar to the analysis of DNA or speech recognition…”

The director of the National Galleries of Scotland warns that a proposal to redistribute art across the country’s galleries will backfire. “What will happen in Scotland unless we are very careful is that local authorities will say to themselves that they need to have a museum which they do not have already, so all the smaller galleries and museums in Perth, Dundee and Auchterarder – places like that – will all have art centres. If you do have a geographical redistribution of works of art in Scotland, it will mean that the relatively small metropolitan collections will be redistributed, or the monies will be redistributed from them, which will make them ineffective.”

Jerry Saltz hates Damien Hirst’s new show of paintings. “In the end, Hirst is just another symptom of the hype, the hubris, and the money that have swamped the art scene lately. I love that weirdos and gypsies are rewarded in the art world. But Hirst and the many others who are currently riding the whirlwind aren’t weird at all; they’re official pitchmen and -women. Hirst’s show merely brings us a step closer to the end of this profligate period. At his glitzy after-party, in an enormous tent on the roof of Lever House—amid dancing models, reveling stockbrokers, and the same successful artists and art world showboats you see at every one of these events—I thought I heard the Drums of Destiny on the horizon.

The Mona Lisa is changing rooms at the Louvre. “Leonardo da Vinci’s 500-year-old masterpiece will be hung alone on a wall in the museum’s Salle des Etats. It will give the millions of people who come to see the Mona Lisa every year a better view of the painting. The Salle des Etats has had a 4.8m euro (£3.29m) renovation to provide a suitable home for the masterpiece.”

“It is no secret that historic buildings have not been a government priority in recent years. While museums and the Sports Council have seen their grants rise, English Heritage has been starved of cash. Perhaps more importantly, the British public appear to be losing interest in our stately homes and grand buildings. Seekers of our country’s cultural past are more likely to want to look inside the home where John Lennon grew up in Liverpool rather than an elegant country house.”

The big new art history “Art Since 1900” is “formidably high-brow.” It “is spectacular, gargantuan and painstakingly conceived so that it can be read in a number of ways. The authors have selected what they consider to be a defining event for every year and written essays about each one. But within those essays are signposts to other entries, so that if you were interested in a particular strand of thought, you could follow it throughout the century. The possibilities of this are endless and it’s not long before you realise that the book could be not 700 but 7,000 pages long, depending on the historical maps you choose to draw up for yourself.”

“For the first time, treasures from Lhasa’s Potala Palace, the 300-year-old Vatican of Tibetan Buddhism, from the Norbulinka Summer Palace and the six-year-old Tibet Museum are being seen outside Tibet. Everywhere, the exhibition has been greeted with protests and demonstrations. On this third leg of the tour, an alliance of the Students for a Free Tibet, the Tibetan Women’s Association and the Tibetan Youth Congress has denounced the exhibits as stolen “art from Chinese-occupied Tibet”.”

Longtime director Andrea Rich’s announcement was unexpected. “Her resignation comes just weeks after the museum announced that $156 million had been raised for an ambitious expansion and renovation, enough for construction to begin by year’s end on the first round of architect Renzo Piano’s plans for the Wilshire Boulevard facilities. That announcement marked a major turning point for the museum, which had to abandon an earlier, more sweeping plan for the museum complex after failing to raise enough money.”