Category: visual

Dispelling the notion of the autonomous realm of art means acknowledging that cultural institutions function within the system of inequality in the U.S. and that there has undoubtedly been inherent bias in what museums acquire and how they display it. Aruna D’Souza thinks mid-size institutions, like the Worcester Art Museum, are in a position to lead this kind of re-framing, as opposed to larger, legacy institutions with more corporate structures.

“The Inamori Foundation in Japan has announced that Joan Jonas has won its 2018 Kyoto Prize for Art, which comes with 100 million yen (more than $900,000) and a 20-karat gold medal. (The Kyoto Prize also goes to leaders in the technology and science worlds.)”

Yes, the great architect’s Glasgow School of Art has been devastated by fire for the second time in four years, but there’s at least a bit of good news about his work. One of the Art Nouveau tea rooms he designed in Scotland’s largest city has been restored and reopened.

The sculpture’s footprint covers 1% of the artificial lake’s surface and rises 20 metres above the water. The sides of the barrels are painted red, with a white stripe circling their circumference, giving the side-view of the sculpture the appearance of relentless cartoon brickwork. The circular barrels’ ends are variously blue, a different red or a dusky mauve. Their arrangement seems a kind of random pixilation, though the order is meticulously copied from the artist’s working drawings.

When a Kerry James Marshall piece sells at auction for almost $19 million, but the artist sees none of that money, the stark reality sets in: Artists have no direct stake in secondary sales of their works. And artists are getting poorer – they earn an average of $10,000 in the U.S. How can this be fixed?

“Why did Beyoncé and Jay-Z decide to stage their reconciliation track at the world’s most visited museum? Swagger, for one thing: That first tracking shot of the couple in front of the Mona Lisa, wearing silk suits of complementary sea-foam green (him) and orchid pink (her), is a first-order power move that echoes their selfie from 2014 in the same gallery. It also relies on Paris’s romance and glamour. … This video would make no sense at Madrid’s imposing Museo del Prado or Vienna’s lush Kunsthistorisches Museum.”

Spencer Tunick specializes in mass nude photography, but the supermarket giant in inner Melbourne wasn’t, at first, keen on letting the artist do his proposed shoot, which already had more than 10,000 people signed up. The company said it would disrupt weekend shoppers. So, “the organisers proposed to reschedule the shoot for a Monday morning and Woolworths agreed. The shoot will now … be completed in one hour and participants will be urged to take public transport to ensure that some carparks would be available for customers.”

Nell Irvin Painter (yes, that’s her real name) changed her hair as well as her understanding when she got her MFA: “I could just feel that in art school, in that world, my natural hair seemed kind of 20th century. It was akin to my great handicap, which was my 20th century eyes. I really had to bring my eyes into the 21th century, which was a long-running process that is still going on. So I changed and the way I look changed.”

As some experts believe the Mackintosh building could be reconstructed – but at a huge cost, “Muriel Gray, who is the chair of the art school’s board of governors, acknowledged later on Sunday that there would now be ‘a difficult waiting game’ before discovering more about the cause of the fire and its consequences.”