Category: visual

Renaissance tapestries are cold, ice cold – no one seems to want to spend substantial amounts of money on them. But new tapestries? Think computer-assisted, bright, and built to last. “Artists are getting really excited by tapestry and are trying to push what can be done with the medium.”

Tim Hetherington, killed on assignment in 2011, “abhorred violence, but he took it upon himself to explore the subject of war on the front lines, alongside soldiers in Liberia, Afghanistan, and Libya. While embedded in Afghanistan on assignment for Vanity Fair (for which he won the 2007 World Press Photo of the Year), Hetherington came to understand war as a function of male sexuality.”

Lubaina Himid won the prize in 2017 and has shows planned all over Europe this year. “All were programmed before the prize was announced, but Ms. Himid is now using her enhanced clout to request that galleries showing her work reach out to black artists living and working nearby and include them in events like talks and debates that run with the exhibitions. If curators say there are no black artists working in their region, as Ms. Himid said they often do, she provides them with names drawn from an extensive network she has built up over many years.”

Mattel’s been met with a temporary injunction after “Kahlo’s great-niece Mara de Anda Romeo argued in a Mexican court that Mattel does not have the rights to use Kahlo’s image as part of its Inspiring Women series.” The toymaker had permission from the Frida Kahlo Corporation, but not (some of) Kahlo’s family members.

CB1 will close when the current show closes, after claiming they were having cash-flow problems. “Those cash-flow issues are what prompted a group of artists to publish an open letter alleging that CB1 Gallery had ‘consistently failed’ to pay artists according to the terms of its contracts, wrote checks that bounced and repeatedly sold work without informing them.”

The statue known as “Fearless Girl” will soon be moved from its spot at the southern tip of Broadway to a spot facing the New York Stock Exchange, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced on Thursday. And if the city has its way, the bull will eventually go with her.

In the 53-page complaint that includes lines that reference Shakespeare (“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark”) and that are almost Dickensian, New York litigator Aaron Richard Golub charges, “Behind the ostensible façade of Jeff Koons’ art world triumphs and record-breaking auction prices . . . lurks a well-oiled machine, more specifically an established, archaic System as old as the hills applied to the art world to exploit art collectors’ desire to own Jeff Koons sculptures.

Call them potters, ceramicists, or clay sculptors, but there are getting to be more of them, amateur and professional – and their work is fetching higher prices. Reporter Amy Fleming looks at how the trend has developed and the reasons for it.

“The Tate briefly flirted with the idea of splitting in two and setting up an entirely separate Museum of Modern Art, inspired by the success of MoMA in New York. This was in the early 1990s, before the gallery decided to remain a single institution with two London venues: Tate Britain and Tate Modern. The behind-the-scenes efforts of Nicholas Serota, the Tate’s director from 1988 and 2017, to create Tate Modern are revealed in the gallery’s trustee minutes for 1991-92.”