Category: visual

“The Louvre Abu Dhabi is banking on the theory that pointing out links among a wide variety of cultures will make all art feel more approachable to the global audience it hopes to attract. Once viewers gain the habit of spotting connections, they may come to accept that all cultures are equally valuable and personally relevant. That, at least, seems to be the thinking, and it makes sense.”

Noah Charney: “There is an element of illusionism to a good forger’s craft, but also a mischievous Loki quality to them, a sense that they are ‘more prankster than gangster,’ and that it is okay to admire them, even cheer for them against the authorities. The tabloid media, in particular, likes to dress up art forgers as working class heroes who are ‘sticking it’ to the elites, showing the emperors that they wear no clothes.”

“Despite a slight dip in attendance after the 2008 financial crisis, the museum has welcomed more than 20 million visitors – two-thirds of them from abroad – since it opened on 19 October 1997. In a city of around 350,000 people, the original feasibility study calculated that 400,000 visitors a year were needed to justify the initial expense (estimated at $228m by the economist Beatriz Plaza) and ongoing subsidy (currently around €9m a year).”

“I wanted to make a protected space,” Andrea Woodner offers, “where they don’t have to be completely bare-knuckled about the commercial environment. Here, they can be artists, think about and show their own work, and use the facility as an artist-run project space.”

“The military has decided that art made by wartime captives [at Guantanamo Bay] is U.S. government property and has stopped releases of security-screened prisoner art to the public. One attorney says the U.S. military intends to burn cellblock art. The new source of tension in the 41-captive prison is stirring a fundamental question: Who owns art? The state or the artist?”

“His are the most famous curves in Florence and adorn everything from aprons to fridge magnets, but images of Michelangelo’s David can now only be used with official authorisation, a court in Italy has ruled.”

“For a city of its huge size – 10 million people – and economic heft, Jakarta lacked many things one might expect of a thriving Asian metropolis: a metro system, for one, as well as a major international modern and contemporary art museum. The metro system will be operational in 2019, but the contemporary art museum has come even sooner. On Nov. 4, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Nusantara, known as Museum Macan, opened its doors to the public.”

“The theory of the Young Leonardo co-authors is that King Louis commissioned Leonardo and his workshop to paint a life-size copy on canvas of ‘The Last Supper’ for the king to take back to France. As Isbouts and Brown continued their research, the evidence supporting this theory began to pile up.”

“Christie’s sold a whopping $1.42 billion worth of art last week, besting rival Sotheby’s by nearly $700 million. The publicly traded auction house made a total of $724 million across its four sales, while Phillips—which held only two—trailed in third place with $134.6 million. All told, the houses made a combined total of $2.3 billion during the so-called auction “giga-week,” one of the highest aggregate results ever. The market has not seen such lofty totals since the spring 2015 season when the sales made a record $2.7 billion.”

“Analyzing the works, the AI identified 80,000 individual strokes, and, through the neural network, learned what features in the strokes were specific to which artists. A machine-learning algorithm was also taught to look for these features, such as the differences in line weight, which reflect how hard the artist was pushing. By combining the neural network and the machine-learning algorithm, the study found that AI was able to correctly identify a work’s author 80 percent of the time.”