Category: visual

Christopher Marcisz makes the case that people don’t go to the Berkshire Museum for art (the area has better art museums already) and barely remember the paintings they see there. People – schoolkids and families, mostly – go for the natural history and science exhibits, and money from the paintings sold will give those exhibits a facelift they desperately need.

Two decorative turrets were blown off the old gates to the site during a storm with heavy rains and winds up to 80 miles per hour. No damage to the white marble mausoleum was found.

Rosie Lee Hooks has been director of Los Angeles’ Watts Tower Arts Center since 2010, and she has grown programs, attendance, and attention by leaps and bounds. Now, supporters say, there’s an art program at the heart of her three-week suspension. They claim it’s “related to the mural that local artist Jacori Perry had started to paint depicting jazz musician and Watts hero Charles Mingus on the side of the campus’ Charles Mingus Youth Arts Center building.”

“Known for an accessible and punchy writing style that decodes the complexities of contemporary art for a wide audience, Saltz is, perhaps, the most famous art critic in America. … [His] winning essay, ‘My Life As A Failed Artist,’ published last April, chronicles his pain and regret over an art career that never quite got off the ground – and what his experience as an art-school dropout taught him about being a critic.”

As much as I share the Bay Area’s love for these two great museums, I see endemic weaknesses that threaten their otherwise promising future. The Fine Arts Museums’ board cannot control the ambition of its director, and shouldn’t even try. What the board most needs at this crucial moment is not someone it can master, but a willing partner.

In a world where Banksy street-pieces — essentially, illegally created public art — cut from buildings can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars, proprietary domain is a hot-button issue. Legally, according to attorney Eric Baum, who represented artists in litigation involving the 5 Pointz mural space in Long Island City, “The owner of the building can sell [or keep] the artwork.” And, he adds, the property owner can also destroy it.

Writer Renno Eddi-Lodge: “Design is something that seamlessly slots into your life: my clothes, the tech I use, the bike I ride, kitchenware. I try to prioritise function; I am not someone who thinks about beauty that much. I like things to be clean, tidy and functional.”

Historians may rejoice, while fans of mythology might be a little sad: “One driving force behind the renovation was to put artworks into proper historical context. Mr. Potts and his team have rearranged works in the permanent collection galleries to tell a more chronological story, from 3000 B.C. to 400 A.D., largely presenting Greek works on the first floor and Roman on the second. Gone are the entertaining themes like ‘gods and goddesses’ that mixed figures from different periods in a pantheon of superheroes.”

The increasingly popular, and increasingly subtle and detailed, style comes from prison culture. “Black and gray used to be referred to as joint-style or prison-style, because of its roots in penal institutions, where inmates made homemade machines from ballpoint pens, guitar strings, needles, and parts from old boom boxes. The machines had one needle. No color ink was available in lock up, so the ink was black. But if you watered it down, it turned gray.”

Let loose a British architecture critic on the complexes maintained by Amazon and other massive delivery services, and you get (rather depressing) poetry: “You couldn’t call it country or town: it is a node, a zone. It approaches a sort of sublime, you could say, in which the vast whiteish rectangles resemble conceptual art and the engineered terrain unwittingly becomes land art. Its scale is that of the national and international networks of which it is part, not the locality.”