Category: visual

The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum said on Thursday that they would not use Saudi money for programs on Middle Eastern art that had originally been supported by groups tied to the Saudi government.

Two execs from the auction house talked to reporter Anny Shaw about the now-world-famous self-shredding painting. They insist that Sotheby’s was not warned in advance — and Banksy himself issued a statement that said “no collusion” [sic]. But there were some suspicious stipulations for the sale.

“In [a] video posted on Tuesday entitled Shred the Love (the director’s cut), Banksy shows himself constructing the shredding mechanism inside a frame. It then cuts to the auction room and the moment of partial destruction. At the end, the video notes: ‘In rehearsals it worked every time …’ as it shows the piece going the whole way through the shredding machine.”

“Featured in the lineup are Eevee, Mimikyu, Rowlett, Psyduck (my personal favorite here) and Pikachu. Grabbing all of them requires making separate purchases, including buying an expansion pack from the Pokémon Center. (How to get a Pikachu card remains a mystery for now, though.)” The line of cards is being launched on the same day that a major Munch restrospective opens at the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum.

The room is a lararium (household shrine), 16 feet by 12 feet, with an altar, a small raised pool, the remains of a garden, and brightly colored wall paintings that “include two serpents, a wild boar fighting unidentified creatures against a blood-red backdrop, and a mysterious man with the head of a dog that may have been inspired by the Egyptian god Anubis.”

Until now, the consensus was that the fateful explosion of Mount Vesuvius happened on August 24, 79 CE — this notwithstanding the presence amid Pompeii’s ruins of warm-weather clothing and the remains of autumn fruit. Now excavators have uncovered graffiti with the date October 17. Archaeologist Kristina Killgrove explains why it’s almost certain that this graffiti is from just before the eruption and not a prior year, and why the particular date of the catastrophe matters.

Yes, Okwui Enwezor was basically fired. As one member of Bavaria’s parliament put it, “Enwezor had too many scandals to handle at once. [He] is not a manager. He’s a great artist, but artists are not managers.” What were those scandals? Yes, the museum has serious money troubles, but one of Onwezor’s biggest problems was a controversy over the presence of Scientologists on the museum’s staff. (Seriously? Yes.)

“Art, which once reflected values aloof from simple (or complicated) greed, has been insidiously absorbed into the economy of commercial products,” Gary Indiana wrote in 1986, “its cash worth determined by dicey variables unlike the ones fixed for ordinary commodities.” The difference now is that the variables that determine art’s monetary value are no longer seen as dicey. Instead, they’re understood as art itself.

“Scott Brown is not alone. A deeply institutionalised invisibility cloak has long obscured the women in successful architectural partnerships, whether it’s MJ Long’s work on the British Library, a project usually credited to her husband Colin St John Wilson, or Su Rogers and Wendy Foster’s work on early projects with their husbands, Richard and Norman.”

The works to be auctioned at Sotheby’s next month — A Street (1926), Calla Lilies on Red (1928), and Cottonwood Tree in Spring (1943) — are expected to bring in well over $21 million to the Santa Fe museum’s acquisitions fund.