He plans for months but sometimes has to do things as prosaic as waiting for a train with the correct color poles, or taking a coastal bus to a random Welsh beach. “In the last 18 months, Thomas estimates he’s visited 150 film locations. He posts the results to Instagram, where he’s built an audience of nearly 15,000 followers.” And so far, it’s all for fun. – BBC
Category: visual
Andrew Wyeth’s Secret Paintings That Made A Woman Famous
“Over the course of more than 15 years, Andrew Wyeth created 250 secret paintings. He hid them from everyone—including his wife, who was also his business manager—in the loft of a millhouse near his home in rural Pennsylvania. When they were discovered, in 1986, they generated a media frenzy that extended well beyond the art world. The Helga paintings, as they came to be called, all depicted a single subject: Helga Testorf.” – The Atlantic
How Do Artists Get To Be Famous? Study Says It’s Who You Know
While past studies have suggested that there is a link between creativity and fame, Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee found, in contrast, that there was no such correlation for these artists. Rather, artists with a large and diverse network of contacts were most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art was. – Artsy
Are Outsider Artists Held To A Different Moral Standard?
“I asked a few art dealers why we hold mainstream artists to different ethical standards. While one disagreed with the premise of my question, another posited a simple rationale: Our acceptance of artwork with upsetting or offensive motifs ultimately depends on the creators’ intended audience.” – Artsy
The New York Times “Does” LA Art (Again)
“As the latest New York Times critic to go spelunking in this city’s museums, galleries, studios and alternative spaces, from Brentwood to Boyle Heights, let me get my verdict out of the way fast. Is Los Angeles, in 2019, the equal of New York as a center for contemporary art? Sure, of course it is.” – The New York Times
Thomas Krens Says Museums Should Be More Like Theme Parks (Seriously)
In a speech in North Adams, Mass., which he wants to transform into “the number one cultural destination in the country,” the man who tried to plant Guggenheims all over the globe argued that museums should become experience destinations with “a for-profit model based on private investment; integrated use of technology like digital modeling and augmented reality; and the ability to draw from ‘deep pools of content’ with ‘huge narrative potential.'” (Oh, and they should maintain “impeccable aesthetics.”) – Hyperallergic
How Do Blind People Interpret Color?
How does a congenitally blind person’s knowledge of a rainbow—or even something as seemingly simple as the color red—differ from that of the sighted? – MedicalXpress
Philippe Vergne, Pushed Out Of Directorship Of LA MOCA, Lands New Job
The 53-year-old curator, who left Los Angeles after the controversy over his firing of chief curator Helen Molesworth (among other troubles), will be director of the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in Porto, Portugal’s second city. His predecessor there left last September after another controversy, this one over a Robert Mapplethorpe show. – ARTnews
Art Institute Of Seattle Faces Closure
That’s unless someone buys the troubled institution. “According to a Seattle Times report from last October, in 2017 a faith-based nonprofit called Dream Center Foundation bought the Art Institutes franchise, as well as South University and Argosy University. The company then started closing Art Institutes all around the country. Of 31 total AIs, only 18 remain. Going into this fall, the Times reports, the Seattle campus had laid off all but 3 full-time professors.” – The Stranger
Looking At Nudes In The #MeToo Era
Museums and galleries – especially those representing a canonical European art tradition – burst with images of women disrobed and displayed for the delectation of men. Of course, there is nothing new about recognising the extent to which the spectacularisation of the female body has been part of a structure of oppression of women by men. – The Guardian