Category: visual

A blockbuster exhibit of French Impressionist paintings in Melbourne has shattered Australian attendance records for an art exhibition, drawing 333,000 patrons in the three months it has been on display at the National Gallery of Victoria. The state government is touting the attendance record as evidence that it was “the right move to invest in the Winter Masterpieces exhibition – a move to be continued next winter with works of the Dutch golden age from the Netherlands’ Rijksmuseum.”

A famous nude, painted in Paris in 1875 by Jules Lefebvre, was damaged over the weekend as it hung behind glass at the Melbourne hotel which has displayed it for decades. Chloe, as the painting is known, suffered scratches to its canvas when an individual attending a football rally at the hotel stumbled into the glass, shattering it. Experts say that the damage is reparable.

The theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream from an Oslo gallery last month has caused museums across Scandinavia to rethink their security measures. This weekend, a Rembrandt up for auction will go on display in Stockholm flanked by armed guards, a marked departure from the usual low-key security one sees in most galleries. The asking price on the Rembrandt is upwards of $46 million.

The Museum of Modern Art’s decision to hike its single entry fee by a whopping 67% seems like a calculated attempt to play to the museum’s base, even if it costs MoMA in the number of casual gawkers it draws. “The upscaling of MoMA is the clearest example of the ways that the nation’s top art museums are trying to change their business model. With attendance flat in recent years and many costs, like insurance and utilities, growing, museum directors see ticket-price increases as a way both to raise funds and to push more visitors to become members.”

“Instant communication and easier international travel have made the art world more homogeneous than ever, but isolated, overlooked pockets of offbeat creativity still exist. One of the most surprising can be found on or near Hudson Bay in northeastern Canada, where dozens if not hundreds of indigenous artists in government settlements have produced an extraordinarily original body of work.” But it’s only recently has Inuit art begun to garner attention outside of Canada, despite a centuries-old tradition of carved objects and a burgeoning body of work from the modern era.

Norway is planning a major reorganization of its national art collection as part of a modernization effort aimed at the country’s museums. “At the core of the overhaul are plans to merge four existing institutions into one that will give greater prominence to contemporary art, to be called The New National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design… [But] critics of the project fear that the changes could do more harm than good,” and are raising objections to the individual selected to coordinate the reorganization.

It’s taken more than seven years, but New York’s Chelsea neighborhood finally seems to be making good on its claim to being the next great art neighborhood. “It now takes two full days, morning to night, to visit just the best-known Chelsea galleries. But for the first time that I can remember, doing the autumn rounds felt mostly worthwhile. There was real variety on view — of medium, subject matter, approach, scale. More important, there were a few artists and works that didn’t fit into convenient pigeonholes.”

The battle over the Barnes Foundation’s proposed move to Philadelphia has become so fraught with emotion that it almost resembles a religious war. Both sides are asking the judge in the case to allow a deviation from Albert Barnes’s stated intentions for his collection, but “ironclad facts were hard to come by in four days of hearings” this week, despite the judge’s order several months ago that ironclad facts were exactly what he expected both sides to provide more of.

A third voice has entered the Barnes debate, and despite the efforts of some powerful Philadelphia interests to silence him, a Lower Merion official may find a sympathetic ear in the judge hearing the case. The new proposal: to construct a 700-foot access road to allow the Barnes to sidestep local ordinances limiting the number of visitors to its current location.

“Inspired by graffiti, posters and the communal culture of the Web, stickers are gaining wide attention as an artistic phenomenon, academics and practitioners say. Hand-drawn, stenciled or screen-printed, the images float on the Internet, available for downloading, printing and pasting in ways that the creators could only have imagined. And as they make their way around the globe, from one e-mail in-box to the next, one cultural context to another, their meaning tends to morph.”