Category: visual

Anna Somers Cocks, founder and chairman of The Art Newspaper: “I am one of the very few people to have been allowed to see Mada’in Saleh, the southernmost settlement of the Nabateans, whose city of Petra in Jordan is one of the wonders of the world.” But many more people will get their chance soon, because the Kingdom’s new crown prince Mohammed bin Salman Al-Saud, is making serious efforts to jumpstart tourism there.

How can artists responsibly use images that are not their own, especially when those images are tied to the history of another culture? And how can museums display such work while respectfully engaging with marginalised communities?

“Laurence des Cars is an anomaly in the male-dominated world of French museums. Since March 2017, she has been running the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, with its envied collection of French 19th-century masterpieces, and the Musée de l’Orangerie across the river, for which Claude Monet produced a celebrated series of water lilies. Ms. des Cars was a strong contender for the job. To begin with, she was already partly doing it.”

Since Bunshaft’s addition opened in 1962, the art world has grown exponentially, diverging into a countless thematic streams and mediums, from monumental sculptures demanding monumental spaces to purely conceptual art requiring no space at all. The unpredictability of the art world and its growth into countless new disciplines demands a different kind of museum than Bunshaft or his contemporaries could have conceived. This uncertainty, coupled with a desire to reconnect with segments of the public long alienated from the art world, has driven expanding museums to favor vast public spaces and highly adaptable galleries over the more intimate spaces of the past.

“This month, 189 of the world’s leading specialists in fine and decorative art – from Old Master paintings to 20th-century design – will gather to work their way through the objects in the fair. They are the final line of defence … on authenticity, provenance and condition.” Jane Morris meets some of the vetters and explains how they work. Says one, “We’re judging ‘beef on the hoof’.”

A collective of eight internet artists transformed the Jackson Pollock room in the New York City Museum of Modern Art into their own augmented reality gallery—without the museum’s permission. The collective, which calls itself “MoMAR,” is making a statement against elitism and exclusivity in the art world with its group art installation Hello, we’re from the internet. The eight artists had their own works overlaid on top of seven Jackson Pollock paintings using augmented reality technology. By downloading their MoMAR app, anyone with a phone can see their work.

“The two paintings, ‘Portrait of a Woman Wearing a Gold Chain’ and ‘Portrait of a Man Wearing a Black Hat,’ are a keystone in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ expanding collection of works by the Dutch masters. And now, for the first time in at least 50 years, both works are undergoing a painstaking restoration that could reveal new secrets in these familiar faces.” Says curator Ronni Baer, “They’ll just look like they’re alive again. Right now, they just look dead.”

In 2015, Pierre Le Guennec and his wife Danielle were given suspended sentences of two years in prison after authorities discovered a cache of 271 works by Picasso, believed to be stolen, stored in the couple’s garage. Now France’s Court of Cassation has ruled that prosecutors presented insufficient evidence that the artworks were actually stolen and has ordered the case to be retried.

“The U.S. Department of Justice on Friday unveiled criminal charges against 10 defendants, including London-based brokerage Beaufort Securities Ltd, over their alleged roles in a more than $50 million stock fraud and a laundering scheme involving a late work by Pablo Picasso.”