Category: visual

“The 1968 painting titled Buste de mousquetaire (Musketeer Bust) was offered up [by the Swiss discount retail website Qoqa] at the bargain price of two million Swiss francs ($2.0 million, 1.7 million euros). Over the course of three days, 25,000 people purchased 40,000 shares, at a price of 50 Swiss francs each, to become the proud owners of the artwork.”

“The aim of the new rules, first proposed in 2016 in the wake of the Panama Papers scandal, is to increase transparency around financial transactions and require banks and vendors to verify clients’ identities and to report any suspicious behaviour. The regulations, which come into force in 2019, will cover all businesses selling works of art with transactions of €10,000 or more, irrespective of the payment method.”

An art historian raised the alarm after noticing that paintings attributed to Etienne Terrus showed buildings that were only constructed after the artist’s death in 1922. Experts confirmed that 82 of the 140 works displayed at the Terrus museum in Elne, the artist’s birthplace in southern France, were fakes.

“The decision to do this rests very strongly on my commitment to rewrite the postwar canon,” Baltimore Museum of Art director Christopher Bedford told artnet News. And while institutions sell art to fund new acquisitions every so often, the BMA’s latest deaccession stands out. While museums usually sell work to trade up, angling for major pieces by the hottest artists, the BMA is instead expanding out, redirecting the funds to correct the historical record. “To state it explicitly and act on it with discipline—there is no question that is an unusual and radical act to take,” Bedford says.

Meural is one of the more notable startups in the digital art subscription space. For hardware that is ultimately just a high-end digital photo frame, the companies are more focused on the idea that a certain type of consumer is interested in a monthly subscription to digital art. It’s a wild idea that has been a tough one to chase.

A blockbuster strategy has two basic, and massive, problems, one being that people who come for blockbusters simply don’t return for anything else. (The other is, basically, marketing costs.) What’s the way forward for museums like Britain’s National Portrait Gallery, museums that have relied on blockbusters in the past but can’t really sustain that now?

That’s what one artist believes. “Fuller said he was inspired after a cycling tour of the Great Wall of China in 2014 and ‘felt compelled” to move to the ‘Chinese mega city’ last year. He said he ‘underestimated’ Beijing’s scale after walking 861 miles (1,386km) in nine months around its ring roads.

Oh: “The dramatic photograph of an anteater approaching a glowing termite mound in the dead of night was originally considered a worthy winner of a Wildlife Photographer of the Year award. The prize has now been withdrawn after judges noticed a problem: the anteater pictured is almost certainly a stuffed animal kept outside a visitor centre.”

Andrea Bruce took a photography class for fun in the last semester of her undergrad degree in 1995, and since then, she’s photographed some of the most challenging and conflict-ridden places in the world. “I have experienced many roadside bombs and suicide bombs and been under fire. Most of the time it’s just unpredictable — you’re in a war zone and things just happen. You have to know what is worth the risk and what’s not.”

On Thursday, the Nan Goldin-led group PAIN traveled to the capital to protest the Smithsonian’s Sackler Gallery of Art. Goldin said, “We are here to call out all of the Sacklers. … The Sackler brothers built an empire of pain.”