Category: visual

They’re styling it as audience engagement, but if you’re actually in the museum space itself, does a virtual experience really deliver more than the real experience around you?

A lot of what makes physical art valuable is its scarcity — there are only so many paintings by Mark Rothko, after all. But digital art has always been different because it can be perfectly copied, ad infinitum. Crypto technology and the blockchain may be able to change all that.

The feverish nature of the art market during the Second World War, and ever since, offers at least one straightforward reason for both the Nazi art theft itself and for why items have never been restituted. “There is no cultural genre in which money plays as big a role as visual arts,” Rein Wolfs, the director of the Bonn Museum of Modern Art, told me. “Dance, or theater, they aren’t about goods. But art, it’s about goods. There’s so much confusion around it because there’s so much money involved.”

The company in charge of the museum suspended Catherine de Zegher after months of mounting criticism and pending the results of an internal audit. Did she lie to the city’s cultural committee? Did she claim art historians had authenticated Russian avant-garde paintings when they had done no such thing – and then refuse to turn over any documents that would have supported her? Very, very possibly.

Liv Wyntner was one of four teaching artists-in-residence at the Tate for 2017-2018, but when Tate director Maria Banshaw made what seemed to many dismissive statements about harassment and abuse survivors, she wrote in an open letter, “I cannot describe to you the personal shame I feel as a survivor of domestic violence, to work for someone who could think so little of me whilst simultaneously profiting off of my ‘survivorness’ and the work I dare to make about it.”

Led by photographer Nan Goldin, who was addicted to OxyContin for three years, “protesters brandished black banners with the phrases ‘Shame on Sackler’ and ‘Fund Rehab’ and hurled yellow pill bottles with white labels that read ‘OxyContin’ and ‘prescribed to you by the Sacklers’ into the wing’s reflecting pool.”

Deborah Willis, who asked one professor “Where are all the black photographers?” in college, has had “a storied career, to say the least, and yet it’s one she almost didn’t have at all. While in college, a photography professor told her she ‘took a space from a good man’ – that she was just going to end up married and pregnant so why bother taking classes?”

In the middle of a 700,000-woman demonstration on International Women’s Day, the collective Nosotras Proponemos (“We Propose”) presented a manifesto of 37 demands. “Out of the 47 major exhibits at the National Museum of Fine Arts in the last five years, only two starred female artists. The National Prize of Honor has had 92 male winners as opposed to a mere five female ones since 1911. And the last arteBA art fair only had 30% women represented in their main section.”

The Liverpool Museums have created about 40 suitcases full of mementos that help people with declining memory and function regain some understanding of the world around them. “Themes include transportation, the natural world and ethnicity; for example, Irish and Afro-Caribbean people are among the groups represented. One suitcase contains items like fliers from early Gay Pride marches and club nights; photos of venues in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s; and a pair of brown suede Hush Puppies, which some gay men wore to spot each other at a time when homosexuality still had not been decriminalized in Britain.”