Category: visual

This, then, is a familiar distinction, the contrast between scrutiny of art’s social background and the connoisseur’s concern with artworks’ visual qualities. In principle, perhaps these two approaches are complimentary. But in practice, they seem to come into conflict.

The world’s most expensive artwork, which was purchased for the Louvre’s UAE franchisee last fall at a price of $450 million, had been scheduled to go on view there on September 18. Now the Abu Dhabi government has called the occasion off, with no explanation and no new date yet given.

“Founded in 1818 [in Rio de Janeiro], the museum is Brazil’s oldest scientific institution and one of the largest and most renowned museums in Latin America, amassing a collection of some 20 million scientifically and culturally invaluable artifacts.” Says one Brazilian scientist, “The importance of the collections that were lost couldn’t be overstated. They were unique as it gets: Many of them were irreplaceable, there’s no way to put a monetary value on it.”

Firefighters and museum staffers were able to remove some items from the burning building in Rio, so it will take time for the scale of the destruction to become clear, but here is an overview of what the museum contained, including an 11,500-year-old skeleton, coffins from ancient Egypt, frescoes from Pompeii, pre-Columbian and indigenous art and artifacts, and a major fossil collection.

“Rows of pigments in tubes, jars, and bowls are visible through the doors of floor-to-ceiling cabinets. … There are the products of nineteenth-century chemical innovation — viridian green, cadmium orange, and the chrome yellow with which van Gogh was infatuated but which, over time, has begun to darken his sunflowers. But at the heart of the Forbes Collection are the natural pigments that were the staples of painters’ inventories before chemically synthesized paints replaced the impossibly esoteric, the dangerously toxic, the prohibitively expensive, and the perilously fugitive.”

When Glenstone opens its new facility to the public next month in Potomac, Md., the art museum will do so at a moment when something new is stirring in the art world: a powerful sense that too many museums have become a victim of their own success, and a new paradigm for experiencing art is desperately needed.

With interest in what is now the world’s most expensive artwork continuing as it goes on view in Abu Dhabi, a recently spotted reference in historical documents may change the story of how the painting came into the collection of King Charles I of England. It seems as if His Majesty may have confiscated Salvator Mundi from one of his subjects.

“Scholars and digital experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London have posted online the contents of two notebooks by Leonardo da Vinci, enabling devotees of the Renaissance polymath to zoom in and examine his revolutionary ideas and concepts.”

In the series of quakes that shook the island of Lombok earlier this month, the concrete homes that have become the modern standard “became death traps” – they fell to pieces because they had no flex to move with the earth when it shook. The few remaining old-style houses, with thatched bamboo walls and woven-reed roofs, are the ones that survived with little or no damage.