Category: visual

Are There Really Any Reasons Left Not To Repatriate Plundered Cultural Artifacts?

“The British Museum is currently facing repatriation demands from Italy, Greece, Egypt and the Easter Island; the idea that it is a better host to the Parthenon Marbles than Athens’ state-of-the-art Acropolis Museum is preposterous, as is the idea that the Rapa Nui don’t know how to look after Hoa Hakananai’a, the Easter Island stone statue they believe is the living incarnation of a prominent ancestor.” – Prospect

A Highfalutin’ Art Critic Reconsiders Cartoonist Saul Steinberg

John Yau: “Being dispossessed must have haunted him his whole life, as did the endless bureaucracy involved with getting the documents you need to travel from one country to another, to settle into a new place. … What saved Steinberg and gave him a place in the world is drawing. All he needed was a pencil and paper. It enabled him to be mobile, to set up wherever he had a flat surface.” – Hyperallergic

The Shed Opens This Week At Hudson Yards. So What Is The Shed?

It’s a fancy configurable space in the middle of the mega-billion-dollar New York luxury development that says it wants to be an art space that “doesn’t compete with anything else.” Early on, many arts leaders questioned The Shed’s purpose and why the city gave so much money to an institution that did not yet exist. But isn’t that true of Hudson Yards generally? – The Art Newspaper

The Artist Whose Dying Wish Turned Her Neighbors Into Curators

Life-altering: “It was a week after the funeral of textile artist and teacher Joan Charnley, who died, at 84, in the summer of 2016, that her solicitor got in touch with her neighbours, Julian Bovis and Nigel Durkan, to tell them she had left them her house – a tall, listed Georgian building in Uppermill, on the edge of Saddleworth moor outside Manchester – and that she would like, although she understood it might not be possible, for it to be turned into what she quaintly called an ‘art house.'” (They did it.) – The Observer (UK)

Guess Who Probably Didn’t Make ‘The Fountain’ Out Of A Urinal?

Siri Hustvedt: “Masculinity has a purifying effect, femininity a polluting one. The chain of associations that infect our thought dates back to the Greeks in the west: male, mind-intellect, high, hard, spirit, culture as opposed to female, body, emotion, soft, low, flesh, nature. The chains are hierarchical, man on top and woman on bottom. They are often subliminal, and they are emotionally charged. Ironically, these enduring associations become all the more important when the artwork in question is a urinal – a pee pot for men.” – The Guardian (UK)

Exploring A Different Way To Paint, And Center, The Black Body

Painter Elizabeth Colomba’s goals include getting Black women into Western art history – and changing how people look at Black women in general. “When you think about black women wearing a period dress, you have a tendency to think that they were serving other people, another ethnicity, and they were not in power. That’s where I break the stereotype. And that’s what sometimes makes people uncomfortable.” – HuffPost

So, Where Is That ‘New’ Leonardo?

Seriously, where? “Few works have evoked as much intrigue, either in the world of art or among the courts of Persian Gulf royals. First, its authenticity as the product of Leonardo’s own hand was the subject of intense debate. Then, in November 2017, it became the most expensive work ever sold at auction, fetching $450.3 million from an anonymous bidder. … Now, the painting is shrouded in a new mystery: Where in the world is Salvator Mundi?” – The New York Times