Category: visual

The movie and music industries are warning London’s National Gallery that the museum’s digitization project is an open invitation to image piracy. “The National Gallery has been working with computer giant Hewlett-Packard for eight years on a scheme to digitise all of its 2300 paintings. The images have been captured with a digital camera that steps backwards and forwards over the painting, a technique that improves the resolution of the image to 100 megapixels, 20 times that of the best consumer cameras. When someone places an order, a six-colour printer in the gallery’s shop will print out a high-quality copy in just five minutes. The gallery hopes to generate extra revenue by allowing accredited print shops around the world to sell copies as well.”

“Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover [Massachusetts], is expected to be named the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at a Whitney board meeting tonight, according to a museum-world source close to the search… Whitney directors have had notorious difficulties with the post. The last director, Maxwell L. Anderson, resigned in May after disputes with the board. Anderson’s predecessor, David A. Ross, who was director of Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art before going to the Whitney in 1991, left in 1998 to head the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”

Oscar Muscarella believes that most of the antiquities in museums like the Metropolitan Museum are plundered. “Whether this should all be returned or not is another story. Put simply, his view is that the practice of acquiring antiquities, outside of scholarly excavation, is inevitably immoral. It promotes a trade that Muscarella, during his more animated outbursts, likens to ‘white slavery’.” he believes that “the important thing now is to stop the looting.”

Rumors are swirling about the coming layoffs at Harvard University’s art museums, but Christine Temin points out that staff cuts are only a symptom of a larger sickness. “The university had already canceled plans for a major new riverside museum designed by Renzo Piano and lost a great director, James Cuno, to London’s Courtauld Institute. It has also put plans for a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the Fogg on hold until a new director arrives and starts a capital campaign. The Fogg’s galleries aren’t even climate-controlled, which makes it difficult to impossible to borrow works from other museums.”

“A British peer is in Vienna to try to persuade Austrian authorities to return a £10m painting stolen from a British family by the Nazis.” Lord Janner of Braunstone’s trip to Vienna is the latest salvo in his crusade to shame the Austrians into returning the Egon Schiele painting to its pre-WWII owners, who fled the country in 1938. Austrian law compels the government to turn over all such artworks which are publicly held, but Lord Janner claims that the government is using “cheating, fraudulent, disgraceful” tactics to sidestep the law.

Richard Dorment is enchanted by a new show of video art. In the 60s, he writes, video art opened up new possibilities for artists. “Art lightened up. Short video pieces could be funny, impromptu, sexy or apparently inconsequential – and yet be serious works of art. And whether artists worked behind the closed door of their studios or in a public gallery, the range of subject matter they could explore expanded dramatically. Nudity, eroticism, humour, physical endurance, and relationships between people – video enabled artists to treat all these themes with a new immediacy, informality and spontaneity.”

As a major Monet show opens in Edinburgh, visual arts enthusiasts protest the exclusion of visual art from the popular Edinburgh Festival. “The medium has served a 12-year exile from the cultural extravaganza and many leading Scottish gallery figures believe a change is long overdue given the success of festivals in other genres such as books and films.”

Is the new exhibition of Monet opening in Edinburgh this week – after years of “wining, dining and bamboozling some of the world’s richest collectors” – really “the most intense Monet exhibition there has ever been”? It’s certainly the largest Monet show in the UK ever outside of London “It is two canvasses short of the 79 shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1999, when 813,000 paid to see Monet’s water lilies.”

Film had scarcely been invented by 1890 when Van Gogh committed suicide. But some Dutch filmmakers claim to have a snippet of film of the artist. “The Van Gogh film will be shown in his native village of Zundert next Saturday as part of celebrations marking the 150th year of his birth, even though the record of Van Gogh’s work and the lack of other evidence appeared to cast doubt on the claim that a grainy passer-by in the film was the brilliant but troubled painter.”

“The Van Gogh film will be shown in his native village of Zundert next Saturday as part of celebrations marking the 150th year of his birth, even though the record of Van Gogh’s work and the lack of other evidence cast doubt on the claim that a grainy passer-by in the film was the painter.”