Category: visual

Art might be a less creepy way to deal with constant surveillance: “We assign opportunities to mark and document our existence all the time, often without knowing it. Walk down a city street, and numerous security cameras record your movements. Go online, and an invisible swarm of trackers will record your interests, your location and much more. We all know this, but most of us don’t think about it much, perhaps because it happens so inconspicuously. Artists make it their business to point out the inconspicuous, which is why some see our surveillance environment as a rich field for works about power and the erosion of privacy.”

But seriously, what does that even mean? Meme-able art may turn into money, basically. “The most spectacular proof of this concept has been CryptoKitties. These cute virtual felines have a collectibility — and tradeability — that has attracted more than 235,000 registered users and more than 37,000 Ether, or about $52 million in transactions, according to the company. Cryptokitties.co charges 3.75 percent every time a cat “breeds” with another or is sold in its own marketplace. In December, one of the 100 ‘Founder Cats’ traded for 253.3368 Ether, equivalent at the time to about $111,000. (It would now be more than $300,000.)”

Helen Maudsley calls her paintings “visual essays” and says that people often miss their meaning because they won’t spend time with them. Her art “is not well-served by the high-speed Instagram-and-move-on approach to gallery visits. The paintings need to be sat with, contemplated, considered.”

Some of the questions NY’s monuments committee considered: “If monuments have the power to write history, who, in any given case, is wielding that power? Was the history true when written, and has that truth changed over time? Does the history serve positive or negative ends? Promote inclusion or divisiveness? If monuments are, like history, intrinsically complex, not easily defined as ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ is complexity alone enough to justify a contested monument’s continuing presence?”

Not for the first time, some of the many works attributed to the artist are very much under scrutiny, and “an art expert has written a report, leaked by the Italian news media, for state prosecutors that says a third of the works in a popular Modigliani exhibition last year in Genoa, Italy, are fakes.” (That’s right: One THIRD.)

With rare exceptions, artists who were hot when they started out found that galleries, and certainly museums, cooled to them as years passed. They kept making art, but weren’t being shown or bought. Carter Burden’s mission is to give them a wall, “because walls are the thing we need,” Vaccaro said.

The MFA’s newest security employee is Riley, a three-month-old Weimaraner who belongs to the museum’s director of security services. Known for their powerful sense of smell, “Weimaraners are a particularly good breed for such tasks since they have stamina and can work for long hours without getting bored.”

“The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum … doubled the reward to $10 million last May, but said at the time it would revert back to $5 million on Jan. 1 if no one came forward to collect the windfall before then. When announcing the increased reward with an expiration date, museum officials said they hoped it would send an urgent message to anyone withholding information about the artwork’s whereabouts and dispel any doubts about their intention to pay it.” That tactic didn’t work, and so the offer has been extended indefinitely.