Category: visual

Will Frank Gehry’s new Wimbledon concert hall outshine the also new Centre for Music in the City of London? That’s a lot of new musical architecture all at once. – The Observer (UK)

Phil Kennicott: “This is a perfect film for the age of Donald Trump, a revenge fantasy perpetrated against elites, who are caricatured as venal, corrupt and beyond redemption. And despite a few attempts on the director’s part to distinguish authentic art from his parody of art as a vast con game, the film ends on a profoundly anti-art note.” – Washington Post

The newest entry into the canon of bad art-world satires is director Dan Gilroy’s Velvet Buzzsaw, which premiered on Netflix last weekend. All the familiar grotesques are here: greedy gallerists, ruthlessly ambitious assistants, tax-dodging collectors, a critic so accustomed to churning out self-serving aesthetic pronouncements that he can’t help but bitchily opine about a dead colleague’s casket. – The Baffler

A small terracotta statue, titled The Virgin with the Laughing Child and housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has been attributed to various Italian Renaissance artists, most recently Antonio Rossellino. Now art historian Francesco Caglioti says that “there are a thousand details, which dispel any doubts regarding the attribution [to Leonardo].” — The Art Newspaper

“Revamped galleries devoted to Ancient Egypt, East Asia and ceramics are the last of 29 spaces to open, bringing to an end an £80m masterplan to turn the outmoded main building into a 21st-century museum, united with the 1998 building next door. The 15-year process has carved out 50% more public space and revealed more than 6,500 objects that had spent decades languishing in storage.” — The Art Newspaper

“This enormous city — with no official census, population estimates range from 13 million to 21 million — is dynamic by disposition. … Lagosians — who are proud of their ‘hustle,’ a mix of effort, imagination, and brash optimism — will turn any challenge into enterprise. Commerce, music, fashion, have long thrived amid the chaos. And now, with its solid collector base and thickening web of galleries and alternative spaces, the art ‘ecosystem’ — the word everyone uses — is achieving critical mass.” — The New York Times

The gift from Rockefeller’s estate is the largest in the museum’s history. “[His] mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, was one of the founders of MoMA in 1929, and he carried on her legacy, serving as the institution’s chairman and one of its foremost supporters. He was on the museum board from 1948 until his death [in 2017 at age 101].” — Artnet

“Workers at the Vancouver Art Gallery in Canada went on strike on Tuesday over claims that the museum’s wage policies are unfair. According to members of the union CUPE Local 15, tension between workers and the Vancouver Art Gallery has been mounting since a previous contract expired in June 2017, with attempts at negotiation mired in institutional politics.” — ARTnews

The museum instead put the images on Twitter on Friday with the French word for “censored” over the statues’ presumably private parts, adding: “Maybe it’s time that this platform changes its policy for museums and cultural institutions?” – Time

Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds. These towers are not only the product of advances in construction technology – and a global surfeit of super-rich buyers – but a zoning policy that allows a developer to acquire unused airspace nearby, add it to their own lot, and erect a vast structure without any kind of public review process taking place. – The Guardian