Category: visual

“Today, you couldn’t tear down a McKim, Mead & White building. The preservationists wouldn’t let you.” But the firm’s long tenure at the top of the architecture field wasn’t always guaranteed. “They were the Ralph Lauren, the Rolls-Royce of architecture. Then the modern movement started, and boy did they crash. From 1925, when white walls and European modernism began its takeover of architecture, McKim, Mead & White were poison to the profession.”

“I work best on commission. I work best when the situation is the opposite of when someone says ‘Do whatever you want.’ I’m not a fan of that situation. I don’t want. My job is not to want. My job is to be, so it’s a good situation when I can bounce back to other people’s minds, and listen to other people’s thoughts. I love to be proved wrong.”

It’s those features, common in his male nudes and rare in those of his colleagues, that led researchers at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge to be certain that the two “Rothschild Bronzes” were sculpted by Michelangelo — making them the only surviving works in that metal by the Florentine artist.

Demonstrating that conceptual art and masterful trolling can be one and the same, Max Siedentopf says that his installation — which he has titled Please respect our neighbours’ privacy — will “just help visitors to enjoy Tate Modern’s most popular sight a little bit more and up close.”

Nathaniel Kahn’s documentary poses the question “What is the relationship of art to money?” to a handful of prominent figures in the contemporary art world, including richer-than-god Koons, Sotheby’s chairman Amy Cappellazzo, self-styled populist critic Jerry Saltz, and the painter Larry Poons. Their answers, while often brazen, land ambivalently, creating an incomplete portrait of an art world that seems completely resigned to the status quo.

“Chop Suey” was among the marquee collection carefully curated by Seattle-area luxury-travel magnate Barney A. Ebsworth, who had promised in 2007 to give the painting, along with 64 other works, to SAM. But Ebsworth died in April, and about 100 pieces from his collection — including “Chop Suey” — went to Christie’s. On Tuesday, sales from that auction totaled $317.8 million, above Christie’s low estimate of $261 million. The auction continues Wednesday.

Austria has been criticised for moving too slowly to return works looted from Jews in the Nazi era. But now the country is facing criticism for returning a painting too hastily—and to the wrong Jewish family.

The Battel Hall retable is one of the very few pieces of English religious art to have survived the Protestant iconoclasts’ destructive fury in the mid-16th century. Though the scars of centuries of damage are still evident, two years of conservation in Cambridge have restored the original colors and determined an approximate date of creation, circa 1410.

Buoyed by a surging economy, Chinese dealers and collectors have since the mid-2000s been bidding formidable sums for the finest artworks from their country’s past. … [In fact,] with their own market awash with forgeries, the Chinese look to Europe for pieces with ownership histories that guarantee authenticity.”

“[The choice is] Mary Ceruti, who transformed New York’s tiny SculptureCenter into a quiet force in contemporary art. When she reports to work Jan. 28, Ceruti will become only the sixth director of the Walker since 1940, and the third consecutive woman, succeeding Olga Viso, who resigned amid turbulence after the Scaffold controversy.”