Category: visual

Philip Kennicott: This may be the most “woke” room in any mainstream American museum today, with works by Native American, African American and female artists far outnumbering the only work by a white man, a virtuosic sepia-toned “landscape” of broken and toppled ancient statuary. But it’s not the crude metrics or race and gender that matter, rather, it’s the utterly new narrative of contemporary art that emerges from the museum’s conscious and thorough effort at inclusivity. And this applies not just to the identity of the artists on view, but to the kind of work they make, as well.

I ask Michael Diers if it’s appropriate to hail the aesthetics of the border prototypes, given their xenophobic political purpose. “It’s always about aesthetics,” he says. “We live in a media world, and you have to present yourself. In 1920s Germany, everybody wore black suits with white shirts because it looked good in black and white photography. Here, the politicians wear red ties and blue suits because they look like the flag — it’s the allegory of the Stars and Stripes. Aesthetics is politics.”

In the first of a series of essays looking at important pieces whose existence we’re certain of but which have disappeared over the centuries, Noah Charney considers Rogier van der Weyden’s The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald in the Golden Chamber (circa 1435-50).

“In an 18-page court filing, Robert Cenedella alleges that a ‘corporate museum cartel’ engaged in an ‘unlawful conspiracy’ to manipulate the market for contemporary art. The lawsuit … says the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, the New Museum, and Museum of Modern Art all excluded Cenedella and ‘innumerable other deserving artists’ while driving up the prices of their collections.”

“The phrase Mexican-British fusion might call to mind an ungodly mishmash of fish and chip burritos or steak and kidney tacos. But, in architectural terms, it looks like it could have intriguing results. We’ll find out this summer – in the form of the Serpentine pavilion, designed this year by young Mexican architect Frida Escobedo as a cross-cultural combination of Mexican domestic architecture with a distinctly British twist.”

“It seemed to us that if we didn’t create a permanent space, we were operating as we used to in the past,” said Sébastien Allard, director of the paintings department at the Louvre, which opened a dedicated space for looted works in December. Although museums are often suspected of wanting to keep the pieces, Mr. Allard said, “our goal is clearly to return everything that we can.”

“In their paper, titled Democratizing Art Markets: Fractional Ownership and the Securitization of Art, the authors, using historical sales data from the Leo Castelli gallery, have modelled a sample portfolio to determine what would have happened had Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg retained 10% equity in their own works sold by Castelli between 1958 and 1963.”

A pavilion designed for Hyundai by architect Asif Khan has been covered with a coating of Vantablack – the world’s blackest black, which absorbs more than 99% of the light that hits its surface. (Didn’t Anish Kapoor buy exclusive rights to that?) Oliver Wainwright describes the building as “an angular black hole, … a portal to a parallel universe.” The interior, naturally, is bright white.