Category: visual

The rival plan for the building – The Old Royal High School – “aims to create a new home for one of Scotland’s best known music schools, St Mary’s.” Of course it does. And of course the developers want to “mount an aggressive defence of [their] plans.”

The court said that letting the sale go on would pose more of a risk than stopping it … for now. “The sale had been opposed by two groups of plaintiffs, including Rockwell’s sons, as well as the office of the Massachusetts attorney general, which said that it would violate various trusts and restrictions related to how the works must be handled. The attorney general, Maura Healey, who had been seeking additional time to examine the museum’s plan, asked the court on Friday for an injunction halting the sale.”

Her paintings “sometimes look as if they’ve been attacked by a 6-year-old gone berserk on a sugar high” – and indeed, “for some of her installs, she will enlist the child of a friend to add the finishing touches: a crayon scrawl on the walls, piles of silly string underfoot, assorted bits of detritus.”

“5Pointz, a former factory owned by Jerry Wolkoff, was a haven for graffiti artists from around the world and became a prominent tourist attraction. Wolkoff had given the artists permission to use the building as a canvas for “aerosol art” and the building was covered in multicolored murals and tags. But in 2013, when Wolkoff decided to demolish the building and replace it with apartments, he whitewashed the graffiti art in the dead of night. On Wednesday the jury decided that the artists’ work was legally protected under the Visual Artists Rights Act (Vara), and that meant that Wolkoff had broken the law.”

Well over 17,000 works from the USSR’s artistic underground, collected by the late economist Norton Dodge and his wife, Nancy, are going to the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. The trove, worth an estimated $34 million and accompanied by $10 million to support maintenance, is the largest gift of any kind in the university’s history.

“Mana Fine Arts, an art storage complex in New Jersey, has been ordered by a New York judge to turn over the Mugrabi family’s entire 1,400-piece art collection, including works by Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tom Wesselmann and Damien Hirst.” The Mugrabis say Mana “is holding the collection hostage over disputed back storage fees, bringing their business to a standstill and preventing them from either selling or showing the art.”

The Emperor Qin Shihuang’s Mausoleum Site Museum in Xi’an has signed a formal partnership agreement with the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where an exhibition of the terracotta figures is currently running. The director of the Xi’an museum and colleagues were especially impressed with the Institute’s educational programs and its focus on culture and technology.

Historians face bills of thousands of pounds to illustrate academic books with little commercial potential, the 28 signatories say. “We urge the UK’s national museums to follow the example of a growing number of international museums and provide open access to images of publicly owned, out-of-copyright paintings, prints and drawings so that they are free for the public to reproduce,” the letter says.

The items once belonged to the extinct Calusa tribe, which lived on the island between 700 and 1200 AD. Archaeologists have long suspected that the area was rife with historical artifacts, but the excavation of public land is illegal and wouldn’t have been approved by the local government.

“Over the decades the business went from a struggling housepaint store to one of the most prominent brands in art supplies, with 24 stores nationwide and James Rosenquist and Red Grooms as regular customers. The Canal Street location was one of the last bastions against the flood tide of IRS investigations, bankruptcy, unsellable inventory and empty shelves. It was also there, in a no-man’s land between SoHo, TriBeCa and Chinatown—and with a steady stream of traffic feeding the Lincoln Tunnel—that the store got its foothold in the arts community in the 1970s and 1980s.”