Category: visual

Last year, we heard that the Met had deficits. It pushed people out, cut its budget, and instituted a terrible $25 admission fee for tourists. I’m not given to amnesia, so I’m having a hard time squaring a need to reduce deficits, an unprecedented admission fee, a $70 million gallery redo, and that second baby behemoth, a $600 million new contemporary and modern wing. – National Review

“When you walk through an exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, every step you take is part of a deliberate design that takes you from piece to piece in just the right way. And it all starts with a dollhouse-like version of the gallery and teeny-tiny art replicas called ‘chips.’ In this episode [of Slate‘s podcast Working], Jordan Weissman talks to Lana Hum and Mack Cole-Edelsack, director and senior design manager, respectively, of MoMA’s exhibition design and production department.” (audio) — Slate

“Heading into their fourth and fifth decades, deep into midlife architectural crises, needing face-lifts, they’re now vulnerable and back again in the public eye, eliciting concern and attracting a second look — and sympathy — even from people who never liked them. But will these loved-hated structures be saved, and should they?” Joseph Giovannini considers the question. — New York Times

“The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which owns what is perhaps Vermeer’s best-known masterpiece, Girl With a Pearl Earring, has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture in Paris to build an augmented-reality app that creates a virtual museum featuring all of the artist’s works” — even The Concert, the Vermeer that was stolen in the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. — New York Times

Ron English, who bought Slave Labour for $730,000, said he was going to whitewash it to protest the idea that street art can be bought and sold. That didn’t work so well: “‘My phone has not stopped ringing,’ he said, listing off the various offers and ideas that he has since fielded. Whitewash the mural at my gallery, one person said. Charge admission, someone else suggested. Do it on pay-per-view, advised a third.”

Whoa: “Researchers preparing for an exhibition on Victorian attitudes to childhood, called Seen and Heard, have found that Connie Gilchrist, the forgotten young musician in painter Frederic Leighton’s canvas entitled *The Music Lesson, was once the toast of England and appeared in many Christmas pantomimes in the West End of London as well as in countless burlesque shows” – oh, and she ended up as the Countess of Orkney. Not bad for a child born in a horrific Victorian slum.

The painting, which sold at auction for £3.4 million, was the first one created in open air by the British artist. The arts minister: “It has so much significance for artistic and historical reasons that it is right that we do all we can to save this masterpiece for the benefit of the nation.”

The statue will be installed in 2020, and it’s the first in a planned series that came about after “the city’s reviews of its statues — an effort to toss out ‘symbols of hate’ — and the creation of She Built NYC, an initiative to create more statues of women.”

Afro-surrealist artist – and Ferguson documentarian – Damon Davis says, “We need to be able to imagine the world as we want to see it. … It can’t solely be based on anger because you’ll burn out.”

Or rather the art market in London that depends on Russian money: “New realities have restrained oligarchical excess. Over the past five years, the West has imposed a barrage of sanctions on Russia, including asset freezes and travel bans, tied to its incursions into Ukraine, interference in elections, and the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain.” – The New York Times