Category: visual

When we decided to do an episode about hotel art, we thought we would be doing an episode about, well, hotel art—exactly the sort of ugly, shoddy, cheap paintings that used to hang in Super 8s. But it turns out that’s an outdated understanding. Sure, you still regularly come across ugly work in hotels, but Super 8’s move away from kitsch is part of a decadeslong trend on the part of hotels—hotels of all price points—to reclaim hotel art. In recent years, hotel art has been transformed from something unconsidered and embarrassing into a selling point—a sign of sophistication and authenticity, an Instagram photo-op.

The rock art, believed to be at least 10,000 years old, was initially found and documented in the Konkan hills of Maharashtra state by a pair of hikers. The glyphs depict geometric figures, humans, and animals, and they appear to have been created by a hunter-gatherer society.

Billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev has spent years filing lawsuits around the world against dealer Yves Bouvier, whom Rybolovlev accuses of charging outrageous markups on dozens of artworks. (Among those works is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which Rybolovlev bought via Bouvier in 2013 and on which he made more than $320 million in profit when he auctioned it off last year.) Bouvier is not named in this particular legal complaint, which accuses Sotheby’s of knowing about the markups Bouvier was charging in the sales the auction house assisted in. (Rybolovlev, by the way, is the oligarch who purchased a Palm Beach mansion sight-unseen from Donald Trump for $95 million, by far the highest price ever paid for a home in the Florida resort town.)

“With the aid of copies created by the painter’s two sons and the use of infrared reflectography, it was possible to eliminate the areas of repainting and reintegrate lost details. The removal of varnish applied during previous interventions has restored the original colours, recovering the characteristic bright tones of the blues and reds and the depth of the landscape.”

Last month an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s works in Porto, Portugal opened with 20 planned pieces removed from view, and the museum’s director, alleging censorship, resigned in protest. In response to the situation, collector Luiz Augusto Teixeira de Freitas has moved to terminate his loan of some 700 objects to the institution, the Serralves Foundation.

“Less than a month after a fire consumed the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro on 2 September, efforts are underway to revive the institution. The museum recently installed tents outside of the charred building to hold a temporary outdoor exhibition of pieces from its collection that were stored in other facilities in Brazil, totalling around 1.5 million objects.”

“The new site will be a hub for participants in the institution’s flagship emerging artist program, Artist in the Marketplace (AIM), which provides professional development resources — such as art law education, help with financial planning, and writing workshops — to emerging artists in New York City.” The 4,800-square-foot space is on the second floor of a former manufacturing site in Tribeca.

In early August, an unidentified culprit painted the rock band’s name and a cat face (or, alternatively, the face of a band member) on a sculpture that had just undergone a five-year restoration at the medieval pilgrimage center.

Miguel Francisco Macias, a retired graphic designer, spent 18 years reproducing Michelangelo’s frescos for his neighborhood church, whose ceiling is almost exactly the same size.