Category: visual

On the other hand, if they hadn’t moved “Vermonica,” who knows what might have happened? “We were recently contacted by the property management at that strip mall and we were told that [the lamps] needed to be removed — I think, because they are redesigning the parking lot or there will be construction going on there. … The timeline sped up because one day they started doing some work over there and they called and said, ‘We need to have two lights removed immediately.’ Our sense of urgency was to protect and preserve the streetlights so that they wouldn’t be damaged or removed by someone other than us.”

“The quarter-mile-long (0.4-kilometer-long) panorama toured the U.S. after it was completed in 1848. A section was featured at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. But the panorama deteriorated after so much traveling on wagons and trains, rolling and unrolling. Paint dried up and flaked off, and the panorama was put into storage.”

“More, more, more. Here, hardly a season goes by without the announcement of yet another new art museum or expansion – all fueled by the homegrown excitement and international attention surrounding the Art Basel Miami Beach fair each December, and all primarily focused on Basel-style contemporary art at the expense of virtually every other artistic milieu. Left behind is the math underlying this increasingly crowded landscape: Can Miami afford all of these art museums?”

“Louvre President and Director Jean-Luc Martinez said that he hopes to secure a loan of the most expensive artwork ever sold for a blockbuster Leonardo show the museum is planning to mark the 30th anniversary of its ‘Grand Louvre’ renovation and expansion in late 2018.”

“To minimise its risk, the auction house found a third party willing to ‘guarantee’ the work. In other words, the painting was pre-sold to an undisclosed buyer for an undisclosed sum.” That third party was, according to one rumor, the owners of another work on sale at the same auction, Warhol’s Sixty Last Suppers – which was, in turn, guaranteed by Dmitry Rybolovlev, seller of Salvator Mundi. Hence the “double-bind.”

“The superstar phenomenon is pervasive in the art market. My research of the last few years has documented the increasing dominance of the top end of the market. A very small number of artists, and the galleries representing them, drive the bulk of sales value, while others struggle to survive.
While this top-heavy bias has increased over the last 10 years, the superstar effect has been observed for at least a century.”

“Works of paleoart – a genre that uses fossil evidence to reconstruct vanished worlds – directly shape the way humans imagine the distant past. It’s an easy form to define but a tricky one to work in. Paleontological accuracy is a moving target, with the posture and life appearance of fossil species constantly reshuffled by new discoveries and scientific arguments. Old ideas can linger long after researchers have moved on, while some artists’ wild speculations are proved correct decades after the fact.”

To clear space for the renovation of its North Building, the Denver Art Museum had to take apart and move Mark di Suvero’s Lao Tzu. Reporter John Wenzel went to watch.

When the medieval-era shrine at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was restored last year, archaeologists found a previously unknown marble slab with a cross carved on it lying atop the limestone presumed to be the burial bed. Mortar on that marble has now been dated to the 4th-century reign of the Emperor Constantine – seemingly verifying the traditional history that he sent his mother, Helena, to find the location and have the original church built.