Category: visual

The Smithsonian’s $2 billion project to revamp the outdoor space near the Castle has been meeting some serious resistance, not least because it calls for the replacement of the formal, Victorian-style Enid A. Haupt Garden. Adrian Higgins argues that the garden is high-maintenance and expensive, especially given that (except for the annuals) its appearance is so static: “It’s time to … move on to a landscape that is more dynamic, less needy and better connects the past to a more ecologically mindful future.”

“The Miami-based philanthropist and art collector Ella Fontanals-Cisneros has announced that she will donate some works from her collection of Latin American art to the Spanish government, which will exhibit them on the second floor of Madrid’s historical La Tabacalera, a former tobacco factory.”

“Hackles were raised in Rome’s art establishment in December at the announcement of a new artistic director for the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Roma (Macro).” The choice was artist and anthropologist Giorgio de Finis, whom one newspaper dubbed “the squatter director.” His upcoming show “will transform the museum into an ‘open laboratory’ where ‘there will be no exhibitions’, he says, as ‘the daily activity of the museum itself will be on show’. Artists will be invited to transfer their studio practice to Macro, while major international figures and scholars from varied disciplines will deliver lectures and talks. Meanwhile, the permanent collection will be densely installed ‘like the Hermitage.'”

“A raft of state-owned museums is rising along the East Bund riverside in the Pudong New Area of eastern Shanghai. Details have yet to be formally announced, but projects due for completion in 2020 include the Pudong Art Museum, the Shanghai Museum East, the Shanghai Library East and the Pudong Urban Planning and Art Centre. The towering 80,000 Ton Silo on the Huangpu River opened as an exhibition venue after refurbishment last October.”

“‘PORTRAIT PERVERSION: Obama Portrait Features ‘SECRET SPERM,’ Artist Joked About ‘Killing Whitey’,’ the headline [on Sean Hannity’s website] screamed. And it only got weirder from there.”

“In a masterstroke of cultural diplomacy, the Louvre will launch a major exhibition next month at the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, comprising 50 works [ of Greek, Roman, and Persian art] drawn from its collection and the Musée Eugène Delacroix in Paris.”

Five months after the much-anticipated Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa opened in Cape Town, at the opposite end of the continent, the Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (MACAAL) is having its official international opening in Marrakech, Morocco.

Stephen Ross calls it “my baby.” For the moment, it’s known as the Vessel—or, officially, as Vessel. (Ross longs for the public to give it an affectionate nickname.) One can think of it as a compressed extension of the High Line, or as the site of a perpetual evacuation drill; it’s a proposed future venue for downhill mountain-bike races. Starting sometime next year, it will be open to the public, via free, timed-entry tickets. Ross’s evident delight in the piece—even as some of his associates wonder about its size and purpose, and its cost, which exceeds a hundred and fifty million dollars—derives partly from his confidence that, in time, it will become “the icon for New York,” just as the Eiffel Tower is for Paris. The Vessel is about as wide as it is tall, and will fit nicely into an Instagram photograph.

Picasso painted La Misereuse Accroupie in 1902, and it is currently on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The researchers used a non-invasive technique called x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy to analyze the painting. It turns out that the artist painted his work on top of another unknown artist’s painting of a landscape, and incorporated the landscape’s forms into the woman’s figure. You can sort of see the landscape by flipping the painting 90 degrees to the left.