Category: visual

After the offering of 13 pieces at auction (two of which failed to sell, including a Frederic Edwin Church estimate at $5 million to $7 million) and a private deal through which the Lucas Museum in Los Angeles bought Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barbershop (1950) for an undisclosed sum, the museum, which is based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, said that it has now brought in $42 million, well short of the $55 million it has hoped to raise in an effort to build an endowment and close a budget deficit that its leadership has said risks shuttering the museum in coming years.

“In 1997, African American artist Kerry James Marshall painted Past Times, an artwork depicting a black family in high-class leisure – playing golf, playing cricket, as well as water skiing and driving a motorboat across a lake. It’s a take on a pastoral scene typically filled with European aristocratic types yet instead filled with black figures. Last week at Sotheby’s, it sold for $21.1m, breaking a new world record, making Marshall, according to reports, the highest-paid African American artist.” Says Marshall, “My ambition was never to make a lot of money. I was really just struggling to make the best pictures I could make.”

“If someone shows you a painting or a sculpture or a dress that he or she has made and says, ‘This is something I’ve been working a long time on, and it comes out of my love for the church or the way that my Catholic upbringing has affected me,’ you’re not going to say, ‘I reject this.’ It’s highly subjective. It’s also highly creative, and so we need to give the artist the benefit of the doubt. Moreover, many of these creations are simply beautiful. I didn’t find them offensive at all.”

“Earlier this month, members of the Belgian art community signed an open letter objecting to the exclusionary selection of artists for [the 2019 BelgianArtPrize] shortlist. … {Now those five artists] contend that the shift in public attention away from ‘artistic discourse or content’ and towards ‘white male privilege’ has undermined the prize and made it impossible for their work to be taken seriously. The withdrawal, they say, is a necessary step ‘in order that the question of art and merit can plausibly be rethought, restored and put back into the equation.'”

To find a new Leonardo is to strike the purest vein of artworld gold. But only a few dozen of his works exist worldwide, and one of them sold recently for more than any other artwork in history. Leonardos have become a cultural currency, so to have discovered a once-lost drawing is a position of enormous potential power. If it is authentic, of course. The French seem to think so, but are they right? And how can they be sure?

“Insect slime is only one of the problems facing the monument … The once mighty Yamuna — after being dammed upstream to provide electricity for the region surrounding India’s capital, New Delhi — now runs low and thick with trash and untreated waste, and blooms with insect-attracting algae. Auto emissions, deforestation and crop burning have contributed to heavy smog that experts say has dimmed the tomb’s pearly exterior to a jaundiced yellow.” Says one environmental activist, “The Taj Mahal has never looked as fatigued, pale and sick as it does now.”

“A painting that spent more than a century in the storerooms of a provincial Italian museum will be attributed Wednesday to one of the greatest artists of the Renaissance. The attribution to Andrea Mantegna (1431-1506) has the backing of Keith Christiansen of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the world’s leading expert on the artist. It means the painting, a wooden panel depicting Jesus’s resurrection, may be worth about a thousand times more than was previously thought: between $25 million and $30 million.”

War, natural disasters and climate change are destroying some of the world’s most precious cultural sites. Google is trying to help preserve these archaeological wonders by allowing users access to 3D images of these treasures through its site. But the project is raising questions about Google’s motivations and about who should own the digital copyrights. Some critics call it a form of “digital colonialism.”

In a new interpretation of the existing rules, the Campinas airport attempted to charge the museum 243,000 reais ($66,000) per day to store six paintings—Dorelia in a Black Dress (1903-4) by Gwen John, Coming Out of School (1927) by L.S. Lowry, The Bride (1949) by Sylvia Sleigh, Seated Figure (1961) by Francis Bacon, They Always Appear by Ibrahim El-Salahi (1964), and Head of a Man (1965) by F. N. Souza—based on their market value because they were deemed “import cargo of high specific value”. The museum avoided the charge after a court ruled that the works were of a “civic-cultural nature”