Category: visual

The Whitney Museum row over a controversial piece of art in the upcoming Whitney Biennial has split the founding family between those who are offended and want to withdraw their support and those who want to see the museum be adventurous. Any idea who’ll prevail? – Salon

A 1910 Marc Chagall painting was discovered in Tel Aviv when a woman went to sell what she thought were her father’s worthless art pieces. The painting, which has been valued at $50,000, will be auctioned over the internet. – The Jerusalem Report

Creating a digital museum doesn’t just mean throwing up a bunch of images on the web – every museum does that these days. A Japanese museum has undertaken a much more ambitious sort of digital initiative – one in which its objects are digitized so visitors can “handle” them in all their dimensions. – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

“There has long been a brisk trade in the kitsch symbols of communism – the hammers and sickles, portraits of Marx and Engels, red stars and Warhol’s Mao. The sales of this imagery, mostly among young people for whom it has little or no real historical meaning, soared after the Berlin wall crumbled more than 10 years ago, according to collectors. These days, however, there is also a burgeoning interest in the Socialist Realist art created under communism by good and occasionally great painters who were reduced to simplistic compositions-glorified workers with chiseled faces and bulging arms, happy comrades astride tractors, bricklayers building the concrete Stalinist fortresses that now mar the cityscapes of Central Europe.” – Chicago Tribune

• The Rubell Family Collection of contemporary art, with more than 1,000 works by Jeff Koons, Chris Ofili (of “Sensation” fame), Cindy Sherman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others, is housed in one of the art world’s unlikeliest of galleries: Miami’s former Drug Enforcement Agency contraband warehouse. The Rubells’ masterpieces hang in “a big yellowish cinderblock fortress with a security cage for an entryway.” An ironic sign of the times?  – NPR [Real audio clip]

“There is pitifully little well placed modern sculpture in London, or in most British cities. There are pieces hidden away in parks and buildings, but nobody is commissioning the really big public pieces by the most important contemporary sculptors – and if they did they’d be stuck in a quagmire of planning problems.” So the best artists have been seeking commissions outside the country. – The Guardian

Hans Haacke’s record proves he’s not anti-Semitic, no matter what the charges whirling ’round his controversial Whitney work. How did the press get such a definitive sense of what Sanitation will look like, when it’s not even finished yet? One theory is that the Whitney is responsible. The museum’s director, Maxwell Anderson, has acknowledged that he informed City Hall about the Haacke installation ‘as a courtesy.’ The Whitney is battling a conservative image, and its director is widely dismissed as a newcomer to the New York scene. ‘Now he’s demonstrating that he’s young enough, strong enough, and activist enough.’ The Haacke affair is ‘the first counteroffensive by the New York museum world, telling Giuliani to keep his hands off.’ How does this theory account for the outburst from the Whitney heirs? “They’ve been out of running the museum for some time, so they may be feeling aggrieved, and this may be the way to show their anger.” – Village Voice

— returns Nazi-looted painting to heirs. – Chicago Tribune (AP)

A painting has been returned by a British museum after a list published by the government last week. “The Three Stages of Life” (1898) a triptych by Count Leopold von Kalckreuth, part of a traveling show at the Royal Academy of Arts called “1900: Art at the Crossroads,” is the first restitution of a painting on view in a British institution. – New York Times

When Korea abandoned centuries of isolationism and opened its doors to the West in the 1880s, a floodgate of Western culture arrived. Westerners built towering buildings that dwarfed traditional wooden structures and thatched huts in Seoul, major port cities and other major evangelistic posts. The buildings are now a symbol of the beginning of Western encroachment, and the government has decided to protect them as part of the country’s heritage. – Korea Herald