Category: visual

The implications for collecting are stark. Only half of the UK’s museums and galleries have money to make acquisitions, and “they often failed to obtain the art or the objects they sought, either because they lacked sufficient funds, or because the prices were too high.”

David Cannadine points out that the price of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for £333m last November, represents over half of central government’s total funding for museums last year. Of 266 museums he surveyed, only half had a dedicated acquisitions budget and in most cases it was less than 1% of their expenditure. The Art Fund report, entitled Why Collect?, calls for a national debate on the challenges over museum acquisitions.

For her most recent large piece for the New York City Ballet, she “has set tens of thousands of balloons, measuring from ten inches to ten feet, throughout the David H. Koch Theater. They scale the building’s exterior and spill into the Lincoln Center plaza. You may even spot them around town, a colorful off-campus salute to NYCB. And because even professionally inflated balloons constantly change their shape and pop spontaneously, her creations will look different if you attend the ballet more than once this Winter Season.”

Conservators had noticed different-colored paint peeking through cracks, but only recently have non-invasive X-rays allowed them to see what lies beneath. “‘This is where technology allows us to get into the mind of the artist, so we can actually understand the creative process of Picasso and how he actually started producing this work of art,’ said Marc Walton of Northwestern University.”

Artist Kyle Langlois, who “has been doing custom airbrush art for 14 years, told me he got connected to Martineau in 2013. ‘He wasn’t too specific or picky,’ Langlois said,’he was hoping I could maybe put a leaf on it for him or something — something to make it Canadian.’ Langlois, who painted the helmet for free because he felt ‘a call to duty’ to assist a fellow Canadian, did a lot more than put a leaf on it.”

“In Austria and Germany, finding missing art is rarely simple. The drawing, along with three works by Klimt’s contemporary Egon Schiele, was part of a long legal battle and an even longer back story.”

The piece, called Remembering, was a response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and the thousands of children who died in it because their shoddily built government schools collapsed on top of them. “The kind of authoritarian state we have in China cannot survive if it answers questions – if the truth is revealed, they are finished. So they started to think of me as the most dangerous person in China.”

“About a dozen life-sized stone sculptures and reliefs of camels have been found in a markedly inhospitable site in northern Saudi Arabia. While camelid art has existed in the region going back millennia, nothing quite like this has been found before.”

An independent investigation by the Queens Museum’s board into the handling of an event sponsored by the Israeli government has concluded that “the president and executive director of the museum, Laura Raicovich, and deputy director of the museum, David Strauss, exercised poor judgment,” adding that they “knowingly misled the board, and otherwise failed to comport themselves with the standards consistent with their positions.”

“This agreement effectively allows the museum to do what it always wanted to do,” Nicholas M. O’Donnell, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said by today by phone. “My clients are stunned at the complete reversal by the Attorney General’s office in barely two weeks,” he added in a statement, in reference to an earlier AGO filing that suggested the museum’s “failure to select the less harmful, reasonably practicable, alternative mode of action” could be a breach of fiduciary duty.