Category: visual

“For more than 350 years, monsoon rains in Agra, the bustling city where the monument sits, were enough to wash dirt off the structure’s walls. But pollution has worsened over the last couple of decades, and parts of the marble facade have turned yellow and black. … Cleaning the monument is time-consuming and challenging. To remove discoloration, workers suspended on scaffolding are caking Fuller’s earth – a mud paste that absorbs dirt, grease and animal excrement.”

“India’s Shekhawati province is in the northeastern Rajasthani desert and more than seven hours by car from Delhi. The region covers almost 5,000 square miles and hosts an estimated 2,000 frescoed buildings built from the 17th to the early 20th century. Many of them are abandoned and most are breathtakingly beautiful. Arguably the world’s largest collection of outdoor painting, Shekhawati is a treasure trove of startling architecture and adornment.”

“I was just going to bed when I’d seen that it had been painted over, and someone had said it was still wet,” he said. “Banksy, love him or hate him, has international prestige and he’d gifted the city with his art.” The window cleaner already had his ladders and other equipment prepared for his Monday morning shift, so he headed straight to the bridge in an attempt to save the mural.

Nina Simon: Why wouldn’t they make the rational choice to get as much money as possible for their sins? Because their choice has consequences beyond their own self-interest. It exposes the fragility of the rule of deaccessioning, the thin line between “treasured public asset” and “hard cold cash.” The rule is built on a sleight of hand, a conceit that says that museums won’t acknowledge the market value of objects — until they will. As cultural theorist Diane Ragsdale put it, “When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product.”

This is what happens when you go to the Art Institute of Chicago, or pretty much anywhere, after being trained by Nochlin to truly see. “How ought we read these works? Now that we know the assumed universality they project is specious, what do we do? Nochlin’s answer, in part, is to see the works in their own time, to lay bare their assumptions and examine them for ourselves. Meaning needs context. By looking at how artworks were situated in their own historical moment, how they resonated then and now, Nochlin takes charge of the interpretation.”

The mysterious, metallic nautilus shell is only one of the artworks that NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs team of artists has produced. The artist team has “made travel posters for planets in distant galaxies, and they’ve simulated Jupiter’s churning atmosphere in a small room. They once drilled a hole in a grain of sand, then displayed it alongside six rooms filled with sand to give a sense of how tiny we are in the vast universe.”

Not only did curators decide to look at red arrows chalked on the back of the painting this time, but they found that it might be more figurative than they had expected – and that the painting’s title had been different, and referring to the potential figure, in a 1953 exhibition.

Wood is environmentally friendly (at least while it’s still a tree), lighter than steel and certainly faster – and quieter – to build with, and basically, a material whose time has come (again). “Mild-mannered, unassuming timber has gone into a phone box and come out as a super-substance.”

The estrangement wasn’t ever explained in their lifetimes, but here’s a bit more info from a tape made by one of Bacon’s close friends: “Bacon poured scorn on Freud, ridiculing one of his paintings in the Charles Saatchi collection and lamenting in 1982 that Freud ‘doesn’t want to see me.'”

Dora De Larios “singlehandedly willed her career into existence” in the 1950s. “Where others went minimal, she composed rich mosaics of intricate color and form. She created work inspired by pre-Columbian pottery and ancient Japanese funerary sculpture, yet her work felt resolutely Modern. … ‘I really didn’t care what others were making.'”