Category: visual

Van Gogh is wildly popular these days, but what about the fakes?  “Serious research is still at a fairly young age, and early research was colored too much with the myth of the mad genius.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“Conceptual art, performance art and hard abstraction still often dominate the art magazines. But in New York, there is a feast of representational art this summer. I decided to check it out to see if there was anything in these exhibits that would give me a clue as to what is afoot.” – Washington Post

A senior Vatican official is being investigated for “allegedly selling works of art with fake Vatican-stamped certificates representing them as masterpieces by artists such as Michelangelo.” – The Times (UK)

The Royal Academy is about to open another show aiming to shock. “Three years after ‘Sensation!’, the 1997 show that prompted the resignation of three Royal Academicians, the show is equally defiant in the face of political correctness. Exhibits include Jake and Dinos Chapman’s nine-part, swastika-shaped sculpture containing 10,000 figures and Maurizio Cattelan’s Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite.” – The Art Newspaper

Australia’s art market is thriving to such a degree that auction houses are trying to meet demand for new work by repeatedly reselling a handful of top-rated works. A 19^th-century landscape that sold for $550,000 in November is expected to fetch more than $1 million at auction on Monday. – Sydney Morning Herald

Blind woman finds new career as a painter. “She uses a technique she describes as mental mapping to work her way around a canvas, by dividing it up into quadrants. And how does she find the right colours? In water colours, I used to differentiate between colours by dipping my fingers in it.” – BBC

When the Renzo Piano-designed Osaka airport – based on the wings of a glider – opened in 1994, it was hailed as a marvel of architectural and technological achievement. “Due to the extreme constrictions of space in Japan, the airport was built on a 1.7 kilometre long, man-made island of mud, rock and sand which has since descended eleven metres into Osaka Bay.” What to do? – The Art Newspaper

While he was wildly successful as a commercial illustrator, Norman Rockwell was almost universally dismissed in his day as a shallow artist. So what are we to make of the current campaign to rehabilitate his reputation as a painter? “The present attempt to add Rockwell to the canon of American art is almost exclusively the work of critics. It is not the artists who have adopted Rockwell, but museum directors, curators, and writers on art.” – New York Review of Books

— stolen by Russia’s Red Army after World War II and since kept in Armenia’s Academy of Sciences were returned to Germany this week. Armenia first returned war booty to Germany in 1998 with a huge shipment of antiques. Germany’s culture minister is confident the remaining artifacts will be returned shortly. – Russia Today (Reuters)

An artist is arrested after a photo processing store calls the police because the photos are of the artist’s naked children. “I felt they had decided I was guilty and treated me as such right up to the day when charges were dropped.” – The Sunday Times (UK)