Category: visual

Last month in London, DACS, Britain’s leading artists’ rights management organization, unveiled “The Art Market 2.0” to lawmakers in the House of Commons. A report by academics at the Alan Turing Institute in London and Oxford University, it envisioned how blockchain technology might “change the balance of economic power in the art market” and “integrate art into the financial sector.” A financialized Art Market 2.0 would lead to an “explosion of liquidity and value,” according to the report.

“Trustees allowed debate over the Berkshire Museum’s financial challenges to snowball into an excessive art sale, … as officials backed a costly shift to interactive exhibits based on thin evidence. Carol Riordan and Nancy Edman Feldman say that while the museum’s money problems were real, the Pittsfield institution could have ensured its future with far less than the $55 million it is allowed to raise through sales [of art from its collection] under terms of an agreement with [Mass.] Attorney General Maura Healey.”

“Room 41 is part of the rearrangement of the Uffizi collection that has been defining [director Eike] Schmidt’s vision for the museum. Next month, the museum’s three paintings by Leonardo will be installed in a nearby room. Together, these artists capture ‘a magic moment in the first decade of the 16th century when Florence was the cultural and artistic center of the world,’ Mr. Schmidt said.” Elisabetta Povoledo pays a visit.

“With an estimated A$1bn dollars flowing into Australia’s second largest city through cultural tourism each year, Melbourne has long-been described as the country’s cultural capital. … In a move that should cement Melbourne’s place at the top, the Victorian State Government has now announced a partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) — one of the world’s most-visited art museums — to build Australia’s largest contemporary art gallery, NGV Contemporary, in the city’s revitalised arts precinct.”

Sanford Schwartz: “Put roughly, an outsider artist is a figure who makes a body of work while operating in relative isolation, unaware of, or indifferent to, developments in the work of professional artists … An outsider artist might be someone who resolutely, and perhaps eccentrically, wants to live and work only on her or his terms. An outsider artist might be someone who has been institutionalized, or who suffers some physical impairment, which keeps the person at a remove from others. But an outsider artist, as the term has evolved, might as easily be someone whose daily experience — as, say, a black person in the South — has kept that person from having any real contact with the larger culture beyond his or her immediate community.”

“As accusations continue to unfold, US museums have been forced to confront, publicly and in real time, ethical dilemmas such as how or whether to show work by alleged abusers — but there is no standard, accepted institutional response to such situations.” Jillian Steinhauer looks at the choices five different museums made.”

“In what is considered a world first, a single-floor, three-room house made of 3D-printed concrete will be ready for occupation in 2019. More than 20 people have already registered their interest in the house since Dutch construction company Van Wijnen announced the project. It will be the first of five 3D concrete homes to be built in a wood in [the Dutch city of Eindhoven].”

Much of the art that leaves North Korea actually travels to a small village outside Tuscany where Pier Luigi Cecioni runs his modest gallery devoted to the art of Mansudae Studio, one of the world’s largest art production centers operating since 1959.

One sees the dangerous level of fantasy that has engulfed the project in a press release published by the gallery after the government finally coughed up the funds. Oblivious to the deficiencies of the collection and the exhibition programme, it crowed that the grant would transform the AGNSW “into one of the world’s greatest art museums”.

The Dia Art Foundation has announced plans to revitalize its existing exhibition spaces in New York—in Chelsea, SoHo, and the upstate town of Beacon—while developing an endowment for operations in the future. Funding for the initiatives will come from a $78-million capital campaign, the majority of which will be invested in the organization’s endowment. So far, $60 million has already been raised.