Category: visual

A lot of docents are going to have to revamp their faintly salacious Baroque art tours – but only slightly, because the researchers found, through analysis of Caravaggio’s teeth, that the sepsis set in from an infected sword wound.

Artist Steven Kutcher, who paints various bugs’ (and tarantulas’) feet and then creates larger paintings based on the trails: “My favorite artists are the good ones. They created new languages.”

The lawsuit should be settled soon, one way or another. But the activists who filed it are furious to find that the American Museum of Natural History has started what it calls “preconstruction work” and what the neighbors and activists call “bullying tactics.” That work includes closing an entry to the park where it plans to expand.

At Cal State Long Beach, where the museum just fired director Kimberli Myer, artist lauren wood wasn’t having it. “It was something I felt I had to do. … I don’t want anyone to misconstrue that I’m putting myself at the center of the work, or Kimberli at the center, but without her leadership, I can’t do the work. The university could have made a different choice.”

Once the playwright started to really make it, he bought a house in Key West, and – along with writing plays – he painted. “Throughout the 1970s, tourists walked past the house, where he sold paintings — sometimes not yet dry — over his fence. More than once, he arrived at a dinner with a fresh canvas under his arm as a gift.”

In an unusual game of musical chairs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Frick Collection announced today (21 September) that the Met will vacate the Brutalist Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 2020. Its departure will make way for the Frick to move in late that year while its mansion undergoes a renovation and expansion five blocks away.

“It’s been a roller-coaster three years for [the Museum of Contemporary Art], amid setbacks, leaps ahead and everything in between. But the long-mothballed museum is finally, actually, happening this weekend. … What do the final few days before opening look like? Let’s let five of [MOCA’s key figures] talk about persisting through a long, sometimes messy journey.”

“MOCA — or the Art Gallery of North York, or MOCCA, all of which figure into the plucky museum’s patchwork history — has covered miles and years from Mel Lastman Square all the way, finally, to its stately, spanking new home on Sterling Road. … Here it is, [that history,] step by step.”

It is no better-tasting and no healthier than many other vegetables. It is but one vegetable. The same is true of contemporary art. The public has shown, through its attendance at major shows of older art, that it wants a range of options. So it is time for museums to return to their true mission: the presentation and teaching of art from all significant periods and cultures, oblivious to temporary market trends and distortions.

“There was tremendous enthusiasm from a broad audience about what I did there — not just kids who went to “Art in the Streets,” but patrons, all kinds of people. And I remain friends with so many of these people. So it was a very strange situation where there was a lot of enthusiasm in part from the public for what I was doing, and from people in the universities and city government, and it is a very narrow group, even before I got there, that for whatever reason didn’t want me there. And they succeeded in driving me out. But that was not enough to topple my mission. This is like a museum-type space; I don’t need the board and all that trouble. I can do whatever I want here. I have zero bitterness. I love L.A.”