Category: visual

In a city with more than 800 public monuments, four in particular have irked artists and academics, who have signed a public petition. The 500 signatories are advocating for the removal of monuments of Christopher Columbus, James Marion Sims, Theodore Roosevelt and one adjoined honouring Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval. “For too long, they have generated harm and offense as expressions of white supremacy,” reads the petition, in a city which “preaches tolerance and equity”.

Well … here’s the official explanation (disputed by U.S. intelligence experts): “Disputing reports that the 32-year-old Saudi crown prince had bought the painting through a little-known distant cousin, an embassy spokeswoman said in a statement that the cousin had instead acted as an agent for the ministry of culture of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates. The painting will hang there in a newly opened branch of the Louvre.”

A photographer makes art from chaos: “Ornate, posed studio portraits of locals are juxtaposed with striking laser-cut collages and sculptural installations made from the brightly coloured products on sale: plastic buckets, woven mats, chairs, hats, bowls, beads, umbrellas, footballs and fabrics of every hue.”

Not surprisingly, “the museum takes issue with the sale interruption and implores the court to embrace its request to move the case as quickly as possible.”

“Last year, European old masters generated $594 million of auction sales, just 6 percent of the global total, according to a report published by Art Basel and U.B.S. This modest percentage is surely set to rise after that Leonardo price. But will it have any effect on the wider market for historic pictures, particularly since the “Salvator Mundi” was not offered in a mainstream sale of old masters, but, incongruously, in an evening auction of contemporary art?”

“Artist and printmaker Lilian May Miller constructed her personal image as consciously as she did her artwork. When she was in Japan, she wore Western clothing, often favoring Amelia Earhart-esque ties and mannish blazers. On a 1929 lecture tour in America, on the other hand, at a time when Japanese women were casting off kimonos, she wore traditional Japanese dress. She cropped her hair short, went by Jack among family and friends, and described herself as unable to work up ‘even the ghost of’ a romantic interest in men.”

Financial journalist Felix Salmon explains why the up-and-down prices for Hirst’s art at auctions aren’t a good indicator of how valuable his work really is, and argues that Hirst has basically become a maker and seller of luxury goods – which is as it should be.

Three years ago, it was the singularly unlovely marsala; the next year, Pantone chose blue and pink (in honor of gender fluidity); for this past year, it was – not green, but “greenery.” For 2018, it’s “the highlighter-purple shade that has also been the name of a Warhol superstar who died in 2014; a 2006 dystopian action film starring Milla Jovovich as a rebel infected with a vampiric virus; an online activist community founded in 2012 to combat sexism and violence toward women; and a kind of light that can cause skin cancer (ahem).” Yes, it’s Ultra Violet [sic].

“When the project was officially launched just over a year ago it was said to be aimed at tackling the “institutional embarrassment” of how work by the likes of Allan Ramsay, Sir Henry Raeburn, Alexander Nasmyth and Phoebe Anna Traquair is displayed. But it emerged in May of that extending the existing 19th century building by around five metres had been ruled out due to the concerns over the cost and complexity of building above railway tunnels.”