Category: visual

Ron Radford is a popular choice as new director of Australia’s National Gallery of Art. Radford is “known in Adelaide, where he has been director of the Art Gallery of South Australia for 13 years, as a boisterous, larger than life bon vivant with a wicked sense of humour and an easy ability to dissolve potential conflict with light-heartedness.”

In Beijing, a group of artists (as artists do) clustered together, fixed up some space and set up 74 galleries and private art studios in a refurbished 1950’s-era weapons factory. Some critics feel that an artist complex is not a good idea, but “the artists were supported by officials who said that a flourishing art scene would help Beijing become a vibrant city. Long Xingmin, the assistant party secretary of development and planning ministry for Beijing, visited the galleries in April, and the vice mayor of Beijing has weighed in to support the artists. Visiting dignitaries, including the president of Switzerland, have also stopped by the complex to offer support.”

“For decades Latin American art has been the poor cousin in the house of academic art history departments. Few universities offer an introduction to Latin American art on a regular basis. Asia and Africa have always received more attention, in part because of the ways their art was absorbed by European and American artists in the 19th and 20th centuries. What would Picasso and Matisse be without tribal masks, Oceanic sculpture and Japanese prints? Like American art and literature before World War II, Latin American culture has received less respect than it deserves.” Now an attempt to change that…

The British Museum is giving visitors an opportunity to look inside an ancient mummy. “Using the latest in medical technology, visitors see under the mummy’s wrappings and flesh, catching researchers’ insights into the art that went into its creation.”

A Staten Island correction officer has pleaded guilty to involvement in the theft of a $250,000 Salvador Dali painting from Rikers Island jail. Under the terms of the plea agreement, Timothy Pina, 45, will be sentenced to five years probation and will resign from the Department of Correction.

A janitor has thrown away a bag of trash that was “part of a Tate Britain work of art. The bag filled with discarded paper and cardboard was part of a work by Gustav Metzger, said to demonstrate the ‘finite existence’ of art.”

“Wherever The Scream is now, it is almost certainly not in a billionaire’s study. Except in movies, thieves are seldom connoisseurs. In the eyes of a typical art thief, the most dazzling of paintings is simply a multi-million dollar bill hanging on a poorly guarded wall. Those who steal art are surprisingly casual about the details of how they might turn their newly acquired paintings into money. In my interviews with art thieves, they talked lightly about “Arab sheiks” or “South American drug lords” sure to want a bargain-price Van Gogh.”

Why is the care of Hawaiian ancestral remains such an emotional issue? Recent news of artifacts and remains being illegally sold on Hawaii’s Big Island has reopened controversies. “This sanctity is violated, Native Hawaiians believe, when remains and artifacts are removed from the sacred caves, whether by grave robbers or archaeologists.”

An English architect preoposes a new classification for buildings. It’s an “X” rating thta would be awarded for buildings considered public eyesores. “I want the government to introduce grants for destruction. How often has a bad piece of architecture marred a beautiful view? In every town there are three or four buildings that are universally disliked.”

Brian Kennedy came to run the National Gallery of Australia in 1997, and filled the landscape with his controversial opinions. Now he’s leaving and “colleagues and observers within the art world choose their words carefully to give a positive public summing-up of his time. Perhaps it was a cultural misunderstanding: humour in one national argot can be seen as brusqueness or querulousness in another. In any case, when he leaves his job tomorrow, after weeks of goodbyes, Kennedy will bequeath his successor an institution in need of artistic, political and social resuscitation.”