Category: visual

Museum of Modern Art workers have been on strike since April, and as the days go on and workers continue to trickle across the picket line, things seem to be getting uglier. One thing that distinguishes this strike is that it involves white-collar workers, many of whom have had no experience with a union. – The Village Voice

The Brooklyn Museum has had enough controversy for awhile. So this summer they will present a Maxfield Parrish and William Merritt Chase exhibition – peaceful perfection filled with blue skies and still ponds. Fittingly, both artists had their own experience with giving the public what it wants a hundred year ago. Parrish, for instance, “knew how to market paradise; he understood that in America the beautiful, innocence sells.” – New York Magazine

An estimated £150 million-£2 billion worth of art treasures are looted from sites around the world every year, according to a new Institute for Archaeological Research report. “Buddhas in Cambodia have been decapitated with power saws and the illegal trade in fossil hunting stretches from Nebraska to the Gobi Desert.” The report urges Britain to sign the 1970 UNESCO Convention prohibiting illegal exports and imports of artifacts, claiming up to 90% of antiquities auctioned in London over the past 20 years were sold without any details of provenance. – Yahoo! News (Reuters)

George Segal, who died at age 75 last Friday, is remembered not only as a preeminent pop artist, but also as a sculptor whose depiction of sexual freedom and tolerance of difference were way ahead of his time. “It’s significant that in 1983 (in his “Gay Liberation” sculpture commemorating New York’s Stonewall riots) he had already sought to include gays and lesbians as a part of his vision of America.” – Salon

Pop artist George Segal dies in New Jersey at age 75. – CBC

• “He had a very sophisticated and deep understanding of people and expressed that through his sculpture.” – Newsweek

Malcolm Rogers has been in charge of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for five years. The museum’s debt is down, attendance is up and the institution is reaching into the community. But the MFA has also been charged with controversy. No question the museum is being reinvented. Is it for the better? – Boston Globe

London is besotted by contemporary art. But the National Gallery, by definition a collector of things past, has not participated. But now an “inspired” plan to ask today’s art stars to produce works based on the National’s collection. – The Sunday Times (UK)

They romped all over Tracy Emin’s bed at the Tate and peed in Marcel Duchamps’s urinal. But two London performance artists say their actions are serious art – not pranks. So what is the point? – The Observer (UK)

A former Azerbaijani prosecutor has been convicted and sentenced for his role in the bizarre theft of some 200 prints and drawings, including a dozen rare works by Old Masters Albrecht Dürer , Rembrandt and Jacob van Ruisdael worth as much as $10 million dollars. – MSNBC

Two English teachers have been caught at Istanbul’s airport trying to smuggle 925 ancient Byzantine and Roman artifacts out of Turkey. – Turkish Daily News