Category: visual

“It turns out there is another – even two – out there. And at least one dealer thinks they could be worth as much as $200 million each. Both are smaller-scale, devotional paintings depicting the same image: the Virgin Mary with the Christ child in her lap. The baby is holding a cross-shaped stick used to wind yarn, which has inspired the shared name, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder.”

“It’s not a luxury product. I mean it may appear to people who buy Hermes bags, but it’s not a Hermes bag. Sometimes people try to categorize it as a luxury. It’s a disservice to art in my opinion. And it really distorts the nature of the market.” (Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?) (video)

“The painting, on an apartment building on Broome Street in the Lower East Side, was commissioned by a local street art foundation and made by a Swedish artist, Carolina Falkholt, as a companion to a similarly vast if more abstract vagina, further east on Pike Street.” The landlord has now had it painted over.

“The conventional wisdom is that design costs more and is only a luxury. Yet people from all walks of life deserve good design. The power of design to dignify will never be fully explored until average people have some sense that they deserve better.”

Anna Louie Sussman looks at the implications of the legislation.

This year’s list runs from Maria Balshaw (the first woman to head the Tate gallery system); through Dana Schutz and the artists who led the attack on her painting of Emmett Till, the creators of the “pussy hat” and of the Fearless Girl sculpture on Wall Street; down to the photographer who created the pregnant-Beyoncé image – not to mention Beyoncé’s sister, Solange Knowles.

“It’s conceivable that some criminal organization or people might be wishy-washy about the $5 million. But it’s not conceivable that they’re feeling the same way about the $10 million.”

“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” the first book in the series, was published in 1997. The film version of that novel appeared in 2001. This year’s crop of college freshmen was born between those two cultural milestones, which means a huge number grew up reading the Potter books or watching the movies or both. Many of them have an expectation (or perhaps a hope) that going off to college means going off to a campus that resembles the Hollywood version of Hogwarts, full of peaked roofs, gargoyles, stone floors, stained glass and huge dining halls warmed by multiple fireplaces.

Marc Restellini says that French museums have legitimized fake artworks by showing them, and that these museums have profited from the deception.