Category: visual

The cleaning and restoration of Michelangelo’s “Moses” is being done live over the internet. Viewers can tune in any time and see how the project is progressing. “We don’t just want to clean and restore the monument. We want to make it even more well known than it already is. People will be able to follow the whole process of restoration minute by minute and day by day. It’s a way of letting them feel a part of it.” – CNN

In a televised lecture (excerpted here) on the state of contemporary art, Tate Modern Director Nicholas Serota champions work that is transgressive and beyond immediate understanding. “For me, the undoubted shock, even disgust, provoked by the work is part of its appeal. Art should be transgressive. Life is not all sweet.” – The Independent (UK)

Fort Worth’s Kimbell Museum, which surprised the art world earlier this year when it was revealed that the museum paid $1.5 million in salary to two of its board members, has finally filed its tax return for last year. “The generosity of the board toward Cline and the Fortsons was paralleled by the nearly $1.6 million dispensed to its favored charities – more than five times the amount it gave in 1998. Many of the charities’ boards are heavily weighted with Kimbell board members, kinfolk, or employees, in spite of foundation claims to the contrary.” – Fort Worth Weekly

A caver in Wisconsin discovered a series of drawings in a cave that turn out to be 1,100 years old. “Experts said among the cave paintings were the remains of a moccasin and birch bark torches that may have been used by ancestors of the Ho-Chunk tribe (which now operates a casino in southern Wisconsin). – National Geographic

A collector says he lent the New York Academy of Art a painting worth $1 million on the condition that the school return it to him when he asked for it back. But the school failed to return it and he’s filed suit. – New York Post

A $265 million plan to expand the US Capitol building in Washington is taking shape. The large 588,000 square-foot addition will be underground. “The Capitol Visitor Center, containing auditoriums, a museum-size exhibition hall and space for future congressional use as well as the usual visitor facilities, will be the biggest and most significant addition to the Capitol in nearly a century and a half.” – Washington Post

In the first half of the 20th Century Chick Austin brought a showman’s touch to American art. “Not only did Austin promote artists like Picasso, Balthus, Mondrian and Dali when they were virtually unknown in the United States, but he also amassed an important collection of masterworks (especially Baroque painting, Dutch still lifes and Poussin) on view at the Atheneum to this day. Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, told Austin: ‘You did things sooner and more brilliantly than any one’.” – New York Observer

Michelangelo’s statue of Moses in Rome is to get its first restoration in 200 years. Michelangelo worked on the statue in the early 1500s. – New Jersey Online

Washington’s National Gallery is returning a painting to the heir of a collector from whom the painting was stolen by the Nazis. “The painting, ‘Still Life with Fruit and Game’ by Flemish artist Frans Snyders, depicts a large basket of colorful fruit on a red tablecloth, surrounded by dead game, including birds and a small deer.” – New York Times

During the Second World War Hitler set up a private museum in Linz and had it stocked with treasures. The last surviving member of the team that acquired the art says that it was all obtained legally and none of it was stolen. – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung