Whoa: “The podcast includes a raft of interviews, including one with the night watchman who let in the thieves and the first public interview with a second museum guard who was on duty that night.”
Category: visual
Did Robert Indiana’s Assistant Exploit And/Or Steal From Him? Two Legal Cases Aim To Answer
“In May the Morgan Art Foundation (MAF), Indiana’s representative since the 1990s and the owner of the artist’s famous Love trademark, filed a lawsuit in New York against the artist’s long-time assistant, Jamie Thomas, and an art publisher, Michael McKenzie. MAF says the pair exploited Indiana towards the end of his life, producing dubious works in his name and isolating him from friends. … Meanwhile, the lawyer representing Indiana’s estate — estimated to be worth $50m — is seeking documents to determine the extent of the artist’s assets, based on ‘reasonable suspicion’ that some ‘may have been conveyed away or otherwise misappropriated or sold without due compensation’.”
Walker Art Center To Commission Indigenous Artist To Replace Sam Durant’s Disassembled ‘Scaffold’
“The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis … has created an Indigenous Public Art Selection Committee, which will be charged with commissioning a Native artist to do a public artwork for the museum’s sculpture garden. … The museum’s release said the committee was formed in response to the controversy surrounding Sam Durant’s Scaffold (2012),” which was installed there last summer and them removed following protests by Dakota people.
How Frida Kahlo Created Frida Kahlo
“It’s a well-known fact that Kahlo would revise her year of birth (1907, according to her birth certificate), to align it with the eruption of the Revolution in 1910; what we don’t tend to appreciate is the way in which she consciously drew on Mexico’s religious and cultural traditions to shape her political and self-expression. Kahlo may have scoffed at a photograph of her solemn younger self dressed elaborately for church but, as time went by, forms of ritual, Catholic iconography, and cultural memory would structure her highly personal responses to her changing country.”
What’s Lost When Great Private Art Collections Break Up
Noah Charney: “When the collections are dispersed, the art remains extant, but the story told by the collection dissipate. It is rather like an archaeological site — objects found within, undisturbed, tell a story based on their context. The same objects can tell their own, individual stories, but the tale of how they were gathered and arranged together can be lost if they are viewed outside of the find site, in museum vitrines.”
Defying UK Trend, V&A Museum Attendance Up 26%
“A new and less intimidating entrance has helped the [Victoria and Albert Museum] achieve record visitor numbers, bucking a trend of sharp falls across the UK’s museums and galleries. The museum said more than 4.4 million people visited the V&A and its London satellites, Blythe House and the Museum of Childhood.”
Next Year’s Venice Biennale: May You Live In Interesting Times
About the title’s provenance as an aged curse with a note of wryness in it, curator Ralph Rugoff said, “In this case it turns out that there never was any such ‘ancient Chinese curse,’ despite the fact that Western politicians have made reference to it in speeches for over a hundred years. It is an ersatz cultural relic, another Occidental ‘Orientalism,’ and yet for all its fictional status it has had real rhetorical effects in significant public exchanges.
Can New Technology Finally Read Ancient Scrolls Buried By Vesuvius?
The scrolls represent the only intact library known from the classical world, an unprecedented cache of ancient knowledge. Most classical texts we know today were copied, and were therefore filtered and distorted, by scribes over centuries, but these works came straight from the hands of the Greek and Roman scholars themselves. Yet the tremendous volcanic heat and gases spewed by Vesuvius carbonized the scrolls, turning them black and hard like lumps of coal.
Barnes Foundation Offers Tours Guided By — Anyone But Tour Guides
In a summer series called “Barnes Jawn(t)s” (referencing Philadelphia’s strange all-purpose noun), the museum is turning docent duties over to a bicycle transport advocate, an Indian classical dancer, a queer Latinx social worker, and a black female comic-book maven.
Why Isn’t Art Criticism More, Well, Critical? That’s Not Really The Problem
Melissa Gronlund: “Critics, this thinking runs, need to hold artists’ feet to the fire. Now, I would love for a more ambitious art world to emerge, but I’m not sure more stringent criticism is the means towards it. If anything, the answer is art education: better educated people make better art and provide better critiques. And, sadly for myself, I don’t think criticism still wields that much power. … Everyone knows artists do better to curry favour among biennale organisers than among those of us who tromp along to the openings, notebooks in hand.”