Category: visual

“The democratically minded #00Bienal will be “the Havana Biennial for everyone”, says the artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara, one of the main organisers of the event. The aim is to provide a platform for artists who do not have the visibility or official status to participate in a government-sponsored biennial. Street, Outsider, performance, digital and conceptual artists and photographers are all invited to submit proposals.”

“The first blockbuster museum show to be so labeled, a traveling loan of funerary objects [under the title ‘Treasures of Tutankhamun’] that brought in 8 million visitors nationwide and filled Egypt’s coffers with gift-shop profits, was unprecedented. It was an ancient-art exhibit that was also a pop-culture moment … [And] no one did more to bring Tut to the States, or indeed to bring museums into the larger world of marketing and commerce, than the Metropolitan Museum’s director, Thomas P.F. Hoving.”

“He is a little-known Saudi prince from a remote branch of the royal family, with no history as a major art collector, and no publicly known source of great wealth. But the prince, Bader bin Abdullah bin Mohammed bin Farhan al-Saud, is the mystery buyer of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi,” which is thought to be the last of the artist’s surviving works in private hands.

The painting, which sold at auction last month for $450 million, is evidently going on long-term loan to the new (and also expensive) Persian Gulf museum, which opened last month.

The Getty Center and Getty Villa, the Hammer Museum, and the Skirball Center have all shut their doors to the public temporarily. They say that neither their buildings nor their collections have suffered any fire damage, but the heavy smoke in the air alone could damage their art.

Among the most complex of the installations was the effort to mount a large-scale drawing that was a preliminary study for a fresco in the Vatican’s Pauline Chapel. The work arrived inside a metal case weighing 650 pounds, and required not only a forklift to install it securely, but also scissor lifts and 40 people to help with the task. Marcello Venusti’s famous copy of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment was even heavier, weighing in at 750 pounds.

The work, titled Thérèse Dreaming, depicts an adolescent girl seated in a position that reveals her underwear. “Given the current climate around sexual assault and allegations that become more public each day,” read the petition, “in showcasing this work for the masses without providing any type of clarification, the Met is, perhaps unintentionally, supporting voyeurism and the objectification of children.”

“Censoring Balthus, whose work is disturbing but not pornographic, makes no sense. Removing his work from view would not eliminate the desires he animates and it would probably lead to the loss of other work, which explored other horizons of the illicit. We would lose much of the imperfect progress we made away from shame and silence about desire.”

“Lubaina Himid, an artist who makes theatrical, witty and challenging works that address colonial history, racism and institutional invisibility, … won for three exhibitions of her work in Bristol, Oxford and Nottingham.”