Category: visual

A computer program that purports to be able to authenticate and identify artwork is making waves in the highly subjective and specialized world of art analysis. Most art experts are openly skeptical of the program and its creator, but many also admit that a judicious use of technology could be quite helpful in supplementing the work of trained (human) authenticators.

There are now twice as many galleries in New York’s Chelsea as there were in Soho at its peak. “As a result of this explosion, the inevitable anti-Chelsea backlash has been on the rise, too. The rap against Chelsea is that it is too big, too commercial, too slick, too conservative and too homogenous, a monolith of art commerce tricked out in look-alike white boxes and shot through with kitsch. This litany is recited by visitors from Los Angeles and Europe, by dealers with galleries in other parts of Manhattan or in Brooklyn and often by Chelsea dealers themselves.”

There’s a basic problem with collecting and selling digital art. “As Napster and KaZaA have taught us, once creative works have been digitized, controlling their distribution becomes problematic. In video art, for instance, there is a trading site with everything from Matthew Barney to Nam June Paik available for bartering. Once files start floating around in cyberspace, the certificate of authenticity becomes paramount. And what if that certificate gets lost?”

“The longstanding rivalry between Charles Saatchi, the British advertising magnate and art collector, and Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate here, is heating up again. Mr. Saatchi says Sir Nicholas turned down his offer to give the Tate his entire collection, while Sir Nicholas says no such offer was made.” There has long been bad blood between these two heavyweights of the British art world: Saatchi believes the Tate is stuffy and uninterested in seriously promoting new Brit-art, while the leadership of Tate Modern views Saatchi as a cowboy more interested in generating controversy and winning turf wars than securing the future of art.

“Four years ago, thieves broke into a Mexican church in the tiny community of San Juan Tepemazalco and stole an 18th-century painting of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. U.S. authorities are now investigating a claim by Mexican officials that the Spanish colonial work by an unknown artist has ended up at the San Diego Museum.”

“Amid questions about the propriety of the event, the Corcoran Gallery of Art yesterday abruptly postponed a cultural program it planned to sponsor next week in cooperation with Cuban diplomats.” The gallery is claiming that timing issues were responsible for the cancellation, but pressure from the U.S. State Department may have played a role as well.

In its first month of operation the new National Museum of the American Indian attracted 275,400 visitors. “If that pace continues, the museum is likely to attract about 4.2 million people in its first year. That is in line with the low end of its curators’ original estimates. At the time of its opening in September, they projected that the museum would attract 4 million to 6 million people and instituted a system of timed passes to spread out the crowds.”

Edinburgh’s Royal Museum is a sprawling place, made so by numerous renovations over its 150 years. It’s difficult to navigate, and not up to 21st Century museum standards for storing and displaying art. So now there’s a major plan to make over the complex…

Anthony Hirschel has resigned as director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, just shy of the opening of the museum’s $74 million renovation. Hirschel, who said he was leaving for personal reasons, had led the museum since 2001.

“We just had an election that turned, in part, on cultural values—and we Blue Staters lost! Now we have a new modern art museum with a $20 admission fee to divide us further. The paper called MoMA ‘indispensable to our shared cultural legacy,’ but there’s nothing ‘shared’ about the culture on view inside. If the dominant institution in the Red States is the church, then welcome to MoMA, where the Blue States pray! And what a cathedral to Blue State values it is! Looking around the new MoMA, all I saw was sex, death, longing, misery, anguish—and that’s just the café menu.”