Category: visual

“The results are startling. You may feel as though you’ll bump your head into the paintings, whose surfaces seem palpably close as you lean in to get a closer look – closer than you might in real life. Even the frames are stunningly 3-D.”

“For over a century, it went unnoticed in the finished work, Olive Trees (1889), now owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, but a recent study by the museum’s curators, conservators, and outside scientists has revealed its old, brown carcass.”

“The sarcophagus of the pharaoh Seti I, carved from a single vast block of translucent alabaster, cost [Sir John] Soane £2,000 after the British Museum turned it down … Almost 900 people trooped through his rooms and into the basement renamed ‘the Sepulchral Chamber’, where the sarcophagus glowed eerily, lit by candles placed inside. [His] museum recently recreated the experiment.”

The broadened, democratic use of the word “curating” seems in part to reflect our growing need to impose order and organization on the busy, buzzing abundance that surrounds us. It also suggests the ways that we are increasingly using social media to put ourselves on display, making ourselves into spectacles.

“Writing on Instagram, the 41-year-old entrepreneur [Yusaku Maezawa] says: ‘Good-bye for a while my Basquiat. I am hoping that you will be loved by people all over the world and move the hearts of people around the world. See you again soon. Have a good trip! #JeanMichelBasquiat #worldtour #imissyou.'”

“Judge John Agostini ruled that plaintiffs in two civil actions, and the state Attorney General’s Office itself, failed to make their cases to halt a large-scale deaccession by the museum. The judge is unsparing in his view that the Attorney General’s Office conducted an anemic review of the art sale after it was notified about it by the museum in June.”

“National Gallery of Art Director Earl ‘Rusty’ Powell, whose tenure has been marked by the collection’s growth, the renovation of nearly every space and a startling lack of controversy, will retire in early 2019 after more than 25 years in charge. … Next year, the trustees will begin the process of finding a successor for the longest-serving director in its 76-year history.”

“The museum’s history is turbulent — a saga of economic downturn, collapsing oil prices, regional political tensions and fierce French intellectual debates about the risks of lending its national treasures to the Middle East in exchange for petrodollars. Through it all the Louvre Abu Dhabi has brought together East and West and also managed to unite France’s fractious national museums, which submerged envy and ego to cooperate on the project brokered by two governments.”

In an impassioned address at the same event, the Louvre director, Jean-Luc Martinez, said that “the Louvre Abu Dhabi has finally been born. This project is first and foremost an Emirati initiative; they have decided that the 21st century will be for knowledge and culture. We share how globalisation was made,” he said, adding that “we push back fanaticism.” “We need to find an antidote to the poison of hate,” he said, pointing out also that the Louvre Abu Dhabi “affirms not only France’s past but its future”.