Category: visual

Christopher Hawthorne: Was there some link between the violence in Wright’s personal life that sent him careening to California and the work he produced here? And what was it about pre-Columbian ruins that made them so attractive to Wright in the 1920s as the basis for an experimental, concrete-block L.A. architecture?

On Monday, artist Nikolas Bentel will auction off a Robert Rauschenberg print for, he hopes, $20,000. Except it won’t a Robert Rauschenberg print anymore. It will be covered in advertisements for people and firms—including a graphic depiction of a six-inch penis—that Bentel has attracted to his mission to destroy a Rauschenberg and create a new work of art.

If you’re Facebook, who cares about occasionally having to apologize to a random Italian arts activist, piss off an Austrian national history museum, or (worst case) pay less than $25,000 in damages to a French kindergarten teacher for being slightly too prudish?

Daniel Weiss was paid $670,066 in 2016 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s president and received a housing allowance that brought his total compensation package to $901,671, according to the Met’s 2016 tax filing, the latest available. Suzanne Brenner, the Met’s senior VP and chief investment officer, got a $470,313 bonus, bringing her total compensation to $1.3 million, according to the records obtained by The Post.

Actually, many more people have walked into the glass, but three people, in the first month of operation, have been hurt enough to call emergency services. “The glass has been specially treated to achieve an exact level of transparency and whiteness. The doorways reportedly have perfectly flat thresholds because ‘if engineers had to adjust their gait when entering the building, they risked distraction from their work’, according to a construction manager.”

If, indeed the paintings belong to them: “The heirs of Mondrian, the pioneering Dutch abstractionist, have staked a claim to the paintings [at the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum in Krefeld], asserting that he lent them to the museum almost 90 years ago and then left them behind when he fled Europe as World War II deepened.”

Even in the early 20th century, women weren’t allowed to study nude bodies at the Royal Academy – they had to travel to Rome or Paris to do that. But Annie Swynnerton persisted – even though she “faced prejudice not just for her gender but also for her realistic, unromanticised depiction of female bodies, which was dismissed by those who preferred unblemished classical fantasy.”

Why is it under discussion? Because Johnson finally – finally – had to answer questions about the cost to the public of a bridge that never got built. “A total of £60m of public money was committed to the project, and £37.4m was spent by the Garden Bridge Trust without any construction work being done, even though a construction contract had been signed.”

There’s a new museum of contemporary art, and the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair, which now has fairs in London, New York, and Marrakesh. “Tunji Akintokun, an I.T. executive based in London, described African contemporary art as ‘underestimated and undervalued.’ He flew to Marrakesh for the fair, attracted by its North African emphasis.”

Called ‘Art on theMart,’ the permanent large-scale lighting installation will be a digital canvas spanning across nearly 3 acres of its river-facing façade. The project was announced Sunday by Chicago Mayor Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city’s department of cultural affairs and special events, and property owner Vornado Realty Trust, who will fund the large-scale installation.