Category: visual

As the curator for a new Monet exhibition noted, after he found a painting he’d only seen in tiny reproductions in a couple of catalogues, “I’ve done my time buried away in archives and libraries. Every now and then one has to use other options.”

Yes, this artwork can be read as problematic. Jerry Saltz acknowledges that, and then says a lot more: “Even in our rush to protect the innocent, curtail creeps, and assume the moral high ground, art can never abandon paradox. Unlike pornography, which we know it when we see it, Balthus throws us into a nether region of being unsure of what we’re seeing at all. Even if it’s only coy, that’s still not all that it is.”

Beth Rudin DeWoody, “who is president of the Rudin Family Foundations and on the boards of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Hammer Museum, owns more than 10,000 pieces of art, including a vast array of work that is lyrical, artisanal and playful. But she has a special fondness for the big button-pushers that other collectors of her caliber might be more inclined to eschew. ‘I think art should be provocative,’ she said.”

Says Rafael Herrin-Ferri, who has been photographing the houses of the New York City borough for five years, “I have always been interested in houses and was impressed by how idiosyncratic – and unorthodox – the low-rise housing stock is. They express the personal preferences and cultural backgrounds of their owners without much regard for what is ‘correct,’ marketable, or fashionable.”

“A hue of angst and despair might make work more interesting – jury’s out on that – but it doesn’t make it more valuable. In fact, work created during what the researchers call ‘period of bereavement’ was up to 35 percent less valuable than a given artist’ other pieces. On top of that, the morose works were less likely to be included in the collections of major museums.”

“The findings, published in the paper, ‘Is gender in the eye of the beholder? Identifying cultural attitudes with art auction prices’, reveal that works by women fetch on average 47.6% less than those by men at auction.”

“Scientific evidence suggests that most of what we think we see comes from visual processing, perhaps just 20% comes from the actual input to the retina. Again, what is the evolutionary purpose of this? If we encounter a predator and had to construct what we’re seeing from scratch each time, we’d get eaten. So the brain searches the closest match that is already constructed in memory and modifies it with new input from the eye so we can figure out fast if we need to run for it. Looking at art exercises our ability to innovate images.”

“In the United States, whether or not you are legally allowed to eat (or burn, slash, or destroy) an artwork depends on whether said work falls under the protection of the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA). In America, property rights generally reign supreme—meaning that, if you own something, you can pretty much do whatever you like with it. But VARA carves out slight exceptions, affording visual artists certain rights over their art long after it has been sold or otherwise ceases to be their property. In this case, they have the ability to prevent their work from being eaten or otherwise destroyed.”

Two tombs, dated to the 18th Dynasty (1550-1292 B.C.) and containing mummies and funeral goods as well as a large mural, were excavated and uncovered in Luxor.

“A Russian nationalist activist has vandalised Absence of Shame, an exhibition by American photographer Jock Sturges at a Moscow photography gallery for the second time in just over a year after already targeting it last year for allegedly promoting paedophilia.”