Category: visual

Attendance has increased to a half million visits per year at once sculpture park, and many others have seen their attendance doubled in the last few years. One artist thinks it’s down to emotion: “When you put your work in a park people will immediately voice their opinion and it seems more real and alive. With sculpture we have an emotional response that’s more connected when we’re outside with it.”

Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland all helped Washington State gather info and collections for the revamped and massively expanded Nordic Museum, which was originally founded to tell the stories of the fishing communities of Ballard. Things have changed a bit: “Our story in the old museum was from about 1880 to 1920, mainly the immigration story. But here the story goes all the way back in time, starting when the ice recedes in the Nordic country.”

Paz created a huge open-air museum in a complex of botanical gardens. “With 500 artworks ranging from three multicoloured Volkswagen Beetles to a swimming pool-cum-address book, and 140-hectare gardens boasting 5,000 plant species, Inhotim has been heralded as the finest art destination in Latin America.” Then he was indicted, and sentenced, for money laundering.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has plenty of art by Warhol, Rauschenberg, Kline, and other artists, but it’s selling some of their works in order to fund the purchase of art by artists of color both male and female, and by women of all races. Why? “The massive overrepresentation of white, male artists is a problem the BMA shares with galleries all over the western world, and cuts to the heart of a UK museum heritage that grew out of 19th-century philanthropy, endowments and bequests.”

The artist-muse relationship can be fraught, but it should be one based on mutual respect. “In a blog post published in Japanese in early April after ‘The Incomplete Araki’ opened at the Museum of Sex in Manhattan, the model, Kaori — who uses only her first name — said that over their working relationship, [photographer Nobuyoshi] Araki never signed her to a professional contract; ignored her requests for privacy during photo shoots; neglected to inform her when pictures of her were published or displayed; and often did not pay her. ‘He treated me like an object,’ she wrote.”

Call it the Kusama effect. Since Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Room exhibition has taken off (the recent Los Angeles opening of her show at The Broad sold out their 50,000 tickets in less than two hours), it has fueled a debate around selfie-friendly art. Although Kusama’s artworks were not necessarily made for the smartphone (many were made in the 1960s), it’s still part of the “made-for-Instagram” exhibits, or “selfie factories”.

“The art masterpiece in question – Flesh and Spirit, a 12-by-12-foot painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat – is just days away from the auction block. It is a prized asset of the estate of [Hubert] Neumann’s wife, Dolores Ormandy Neumann, who died in September 2016, and its potential sale shines a spotlight on what appears to be a nasty family dispute.”

“With outposts and partnerships either launched or pending in Metz, Málaga, Brussels, the Gulf, Shanghai and possibly Latin America, … the Pompidou’s president, Serge Lasvignes, is boldly steering it into a number of new ventures, which he believes will deepen the Parisian museum’s relationship with artistic centres it might otherwise be unable to reach.”

The event marked the end of to the international investigation of black-market antiquities and the evangelical Green family, the owners of Hobby Lobby and collectors of biblical material who opened the Museum of the Bible in Washington last November. The museum was not involved in the settlement, and the returned objects were not part of the its collection.