Category: visual

“Her style, like The Dinner Party, is flamboyant and groovy and uncategorizable. She wore jeans, a leopard-print silk shirt under a black vest embroidered with sequins and a double strand of gold beads. Her lipstick was purple, her curly hair dyed a reddish-pink, with tinted glasses to match, giving her a dreamy, psychedelic look. But the eyes peering out from behind those glasses were sharp and commanding.”

“Chicago acknowledged that she’d need help to realize her full vision, so she began to enlist research assistants and scores of volunteers to help with production, whether embroidering, painting ceramic plates, or scrawling the names of historical figures onto the 2,304 hand-cast porcelain tiles that would make up the floor. … Some 400 women and men would lend a hand before she completed the work in 1979.”

“Prosecutors allege that Michael Rohana, 24, of Bear, Del., sneaked into the Franklin Institute’s ‘Terracotta Warriors of the First Emperor’ special exhibit in December and snapped the thumb off one of the priceless statues inside. With the filched finger shoved in his pocket, he left … the museum that night and kept the clay digit in a desk drawer in his bedroom for more than three weeks.”

“[Krzysztof Wodiczko’s] site-specific work, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC, 1988-2000, was restaged for the first time in 30 years on Tuesday and was meant to remain on display for three days … The three-story-tall piece … shows two hands holding a gun and a candle on either side of a row of microphones.”

Suzanne Massion is following a path taken by other older artists who, eager to continue creating and attempting to earn a living from art in their retirement, are turning to online sales to supplement or replace their gallery ties. With the change, older artists are having to learn to engage with an ever-widening pool of buyers on the internet. The experience can be unsettling, she said.

Eve M. Kahn brings us some examples from the collection of some 12,000 paper valentines, dating as far back as the late 17th century, assembled by historian Nancy Rosin and recently donated to the Huntington Library in Los Angeles.

Casts were a booming trade in the late 19th century and museums competed for the most sought after examples. The availability of casts, even though they were multiples, was limited, especially towards the end of the century when the damage caused by taking moulds was finally acknowledged.

“An spokeswoman says that the site will be ‘totally closed from December 2020; the Rue des Palais, Nef [nave] and Grand Galleries will open in the spring of 2023’. During the 2024 summer Olympics, fencing and taekwondo will be held at the historic venue. The closure will, however, cause upheaval in the art fair calendar with three major fairs – Fiac, Paris Photo and La Biennale Paris – forced to relocate to temporary locations for their 2021 editions.”

“Not only are [visitors] taking pictures of art, they are taking pictures of themselves within these spaces. So in the pre-digital photography era, the message was ‘This is what I am seeing. I have seen.’ And today the message is: ‘I was there. I came, I saw, and I selfied.’ ”