Category: visual

“What should a contemporary monument look like? Who deserves to go up on a pedestal? Should there be a pedestal at all? Five artists, or groups of artists, from each of the five cities involved in New Monuments for New Cities were invited to respond to the questions and to create a poster or projection of their ideal monument. The same 25 designs will travel to each location: Houston; Austin, Tex.; Chicago; Toronto; and New York.”

Shortly after 5 p.m. on Monday, three men dressed in ordinary clothes entered the Dorotheum auction house, walked up to Renoir’s Golfe, mer, falaises vertes, took it out of its frame, and walked right out. Said a police spokesman, “It was very quick. Nobody noticed.”

News of Ruben Cordova’s banishment has spread across academic circles as a warning against art historians and artists who might want to aggregate their research on Facebook’s platform.

Stéphane Martin, president of the Quai Branly Museum, which has 70,000 objects from sub-Saharan Africa in its collections, said in an interview with the French daily Le Figaro that last week’s report was “a bad answer to the courageous question posed by the president.” While restitution was “not a word that I’m scandalized by,” he added, there are “other ways to engage in cultural cooperation with Africa.”

There are legal blocks to permanently removing items from French collections and, as a practical matter, there will almost certainly be push-back from the museums themselves.

The lower half of the 1492 diptych, titled The Descent of Christ Into Limbo, has been owned by a private collector since 2003; the upper panel, The Resurrection of Christ, belongs to the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo and was only recently identified as Andrea Mantegna’s work. The pair will be displayed together beginning next month at the National Gallery in London.

“Nearly a year and a half after it announced plans to part with 40 artworks from its collection in order to close a budget gap, pay for building repairs and renovations, and pursue a new programming agenda [focused on science and history], the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said today that it has completed the sales, bringing in $53.25 million for 22 works.”

With a 597-foot bronze of independence leader Sardar Patel completed in Gujarat, work is underway on a 696-foot sculpture of the 17th-century Maratha conqueror Shivaji just off the beach in Mumbai. And plans have just been announced for a 725-foot statue of the Hindu god Rama in the city of Ayodhya, considered to be Rama’s earthly birthplace, in Uttar Pradesh state. And yes, Hindu nationalism is tied up with all three projects.

How do you get from there to making real art, great art? There’s no special way; everyone has their own path. Yet, over the years, I’ve found myself giving the same bits of advice. Most of them were simply gleaned from looking at art, then looking some more. Others from listening to artists talk about their work and their struggles. (Everyone’s a narcissist.) I’ve even stolen a couple from my wife.

“Once you step inside the cast of Trajan’s Column, it’s Victorian engineering meets ancient Rome,” says Angus Patterson, the V&A’s senior curator of metalwork. The museum purchased the plaster cast—one of a set made from a metal electrotype of a mould commissioned by Napoleon—in 1864. The cast, which fits together like a giant jigsaw puzzle, was built around a brick core. Wooden beams, acting as stabilisers, crisscross the column’s interior, and holes for the wood scaffolding that was erected inside the column during its construction can still be seen. Long used for storage, the column’s interior now contains benches, so visitors can contemplate this Victorian feat of engineering, as well as interpretative texts related to the cast and the ancient Roman monument.