Category: visual

The Catholic university in Philadelphia, “which has struggled to plug a projected deficit in recent years, plans to sell 46 pieces of art from its prized museum collection to help fund teaching and learning initiatives in its new strategic plan, officials said Tuesday. The sale, which includes masterpieces by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Georges Rouault, and Albert Gleizes, could raise more than $7 million, officials estimate.”

“French President Emmanuel Macron’s pledge to return African artefacts is an ‘awesome challenge’, according to Stéphane Martin, the president of the ethnographic Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris. … The Quai Branly museum has a collection of more than 70,000 artefacts from sub-Saharan Africa, and displays 1,000 of them in its galleries on the Left Bank of the Seine.”

“Change happens when strong voices are allowed to mature in public, when people take stands without preset or puritanical agendas, aren’t afraid of giving up hierarchies, being wrong, and are honest and earnest. Having a “hot faith in art” has always gotten us through times like these. I haven’t felt this way about this magazine in a long long time. As of today Artforum is no longer a lost cause or a dream anymore. It may be the real thing.”

A profile of real estate developer Abdelmonem Bin Eisa Alserkal, a member of one of Dubai’s leading business families, who turned a desolate warehouse district into the art gallery capital of the Emirates.

The cases cover everything from copyright (Graham v. [Richard] Prince et al.) to restitution of looted work (Von Saher v. Norton Simon Museum) to accessions and bequests (the Berkshire Museum suits) to freedom of speech (Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission – yes, the “gay wedding cake” case could affect the art world).

“Skyscrapers tell a different story. They are the pyramids of our civilization, permanent monuments of our existence. They show who is in charge and what they think about themselves. Salesforce Tower is breaking a San Francisco height record that stood for nearly half a century.”

“The saga began when Mateo Rueda had fifth and sixth grade students do a color study exercise. In the last few minutes of class, Rueda had students go to the library and look through art books and boxes of postcards so they could select which paintings best exemplified the color relationships they had been studying. That’s when Rueda realized that some of the postcards, which he claims had been in the library long before he started teaching there, included some nude paintings, including Iris Tree, by Amedeo Modigliani, François Boucher’s Brown Odalisque, and The Valpincon Bather by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres.”

“For the first time, helped by recent advances in artificial intelligence, researchers are able to analyze large quantities of images, pulling out data that can be sorted and mined to predict things like income, political leanings and buying habits. In the Stanford study, computers collected details about cars in the millions of images it processed, including makes and models.”

Wesley Morris writes about Yoann Bourgeois’s The Mechanics of History, which features men continually climbing a staircase, falling onto a trampoline, and bouncing back onto the stairs – all on a slowly rotating program. (Morris saw it at, of all places, Paris’s Panthéon.)

Following up on his contribution to CityLab‘s “Your Entire City Is an Instagram Playground Now” (last entry), Kriston Capps goes on a tweetstorm: “[In] the IMA’s rebrand as Newfields – an experience park – … the IMA’s board and director turned their backs on the museum, its curators, its collections, its accumulated knowledge, its history, and its legacy.”