Category: visual

A lecturer who dislikes modern art decided to make his own. “He found a piece of scrap wood with grooves in from a cutting machine, painted it white and called it Millennium Dawn” and entered it in an art competition. Judges at Nottingham University awarded it a prize. – Ananova

A Chicago attorney who has spent more than 40 years studying Genghis Khan, “claims to have found in an ancient book a vital clue that will take him to the tomb’s location” and will lead a team to look for it. The whereabouts of the Khan’s final resting place somewhere in Mongolia has been an enduring mystery. – Discovery

Smithsonian Secretary Lawrence Small is in the middle of two more controversies – over the closing of a popular Woody Guthrie folk music exhibition, and over the possible confiscation of $16 million in research funds. In office only six months, Small has been controversial himself as he attempts a thorough shakeup of the institution. – Chicago Tribune

After the heirs of one of its patrons decided to sell a Picasso to another buyer, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art sued the family for $18 million. Now a judge has thrown out the museum’s claim (and other donors and potential donors have got to be feeling a creeping chill). – San Francisco Chronicle

On the tenth anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Museum of American History stages an exhibition complete with aids for those with disabilities. “The exhibit includes a telecaptioner for TV, a note-taker for the blind that uses the Braille alphabet, a CD for access to the Internet and two kiosks with computer monitors.” – Times of India (AP)

The Art Loss Register, a private organization dedicated to recovering art looted during WWII, has located and returned art valued at $100 million. How? “The first is the moral argument, the second is the threat of embarrassing negative publicity, which affects both individuals and institutions, and the third is the claim that the work has become completely worthless from a financial standpoint because it can never be sold on the market as long as it remains on the list of looted Holocaust art.” – Haaretz (Israel)

How faithfully should a museum try to reproduce the historical context in which pictures were originally made and shown? Do you distort or diminish a work of art by showing it in a way that the artist never intended? A new exhibition of Turner at the Tate Gallery tries for recreation but betrays the painter. – The Telegraph (UK)

— which inspired his statue of the risen Christ sold at auction Tuesday for a record $12 million. – Times of India

Young good-looking 20- and 30-something American artists have been turning up in the pages of glossy magazines in the past few months. “Some people want to take these images as signs of the non-art world media’s renewed interest in the art world, and therefore of the return of an 1980’s-style art boom. But the glossified ’80’s artists were overwhelmingly male. The mediagenic artists of the oughties, as the current decade is sometimes called, are often women.”  – New York Times

Singapore plans a new underwater subway station under the Singapore Art Museum. The roof of the station will allow sunlight to filter through into the 10-storey-deep Museum station. Those viewing the water from above can see the reflection of the museum in it. – The Straits Times (Singapore)