Category: visual

Catherine Hutin-Blay – the daughter of Jacqueline Roque, Picasso’s second wife – is donating her collection of 2,000 Picasso works to form the basis of a museum in a former convent school in Aix-en-Provence.

“The [burial chamber] was uncovered in a cemetery to the west of the Great Pyramid in October of 2017. It appears to have been built for a Priestess of Hathor identified as Hetpet. The paintings inside the tomb imagine the high-ranking priestess in various scenarios – receiving offerings from her children, hunting and fishing. There are scenes of people smelting metal and building papyrus boats on display as well as images of domesticated monkeys picking fruit and dancing in front of an orchestra.”

The French street artist, known for his mosaics that look like pixelated images from vintage video games, attached about a dozen works to the walls of centuries-old monasteries and temples in the small Himalayan kingdom. When even his fans on social media criticized him, he responded, “My practice tells a story, and I don’t know why I should deprive Bhutan from this story.” (The government has now removed the mosaics.)

He made his first collages out of the incredible masses of stuff piled up by the hoarder next door.

“The Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies in Chicago has turned a corner in recent months, re-emerging after years of financial problems and curatorial trepidation to organise more note-worthy shows … The slow and deliberate process of Spertus reinvigoration began in 2016,” with a new gallery space and new curator.

The country’s economy is growing at around 7% annually, and the art market has reportedly grown 13% in just the past year. Art fairs, led by the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Kerala state (along with the Dhaka Art Summit in neighboring Bangladesh), are booming as well. All this is despite uncertainty around a new tax and last year’s tumultuous currency reform, which saw all 500- and 1,000-rupee notes withdrawn.

A pseudo-scientific chart on the side of each label purports to rate objects according to “Innovation,” “Design,” and “Implementation,” resulting in a final “Fail-o-Meter” score, with no explanation as to the metrics involved. In essence, the Museum of Failure is a BuzzFeed listicle come to life.

“In previous academic deaccessions, alumni, the public and art professionals piled their ire upon university presidents and trustees. It seems to me that the auction houses are equally culpable. They are training their sights on financially pressed colleges and museums as part of their business development strategies. This is art-world ambulance chasing.”

In humans and other catarrhines, the red and green cones largely overlap. This means that we prioritise distinguishing a few types of colours really well – specifically, red and green – at the expense of being able to see as many colours as we possibly might. This is peculiar. Why do we prioritise differentiating red from green?

Richard Caring reportedly spent somewhere between £20 million and £30 million last year to buy The Girl with a Red Beret and Pompom. Picasso evidently did not give the painting a title himself – so Caring decided to rename it “Annabel”, after a nightspot he owns in London’s Mayfair district. As one might expect, art historians are aghast.