Category: visual

The art world is a soft target for satire, not least because the art world’s appetite for satire of itself is limitless. Artists are constantly sending up tradition and the scene through their art, only to see the cycle repeat itself as their own work becomes staid and canonical. It’s unreasonable to expect any satire of the art world to be fresh, since knowingness is the first requirement to get in the door. The Square won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this spring not because it lashes the art world in a new way, but because Ruben Östlund delivers his lashings so exquisitely.

“In the controversial panel, Benton painted a reporter, a photographer and a printer into the foreground – an homage to the press of Indiana for breaking the power of the Klan. In the center, a white nurse tends both black and white children in City Hospital (now Wishard Hospital). The sinister figures of the Klan are visible in the background, behind the hospital beds – a reminder, perhaps, that racial progress can always slide backwards.”

Friday around 2 p.m., “cursing could be heard coming from a London dealer’s booth, breaking the quiet, reverential atmosphere. To the consternation of several art dealers looking on, the police and prosecutors seized an ancient limestone bas-relief of a Persian soldier with shield and spear, which once adorned a building in the ruins of Persepolis in Iran, according to a search warrant.”

It’s not just those afraid of mice who are being tortured in this installation, say mouse experts: “There are 70 white mice in individual boxes set like tiles on the floor of a gallery on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In clear plexiglass cages, designed to be stepped upon, they peer up underfoot in an exhibition exploring phobia.”

The themes will be similar to anyone who has followed the artist’s work. “‘These issues of power and control and physical damage and death and predation are ages old,’ Ms. Kruger said in a phone interview from Los Angeles. ‘I wish some of these issues would become archaic.'”

Basically, galleries are becoming more like happenings, or “pop-up restaurants,” just to deal with a world that’s filled with high rents and art fairs. “The idea is to create a model that is more affordable and flexible and allows galleries to come and occupy a space for a designated period of time.”

Well, pre-Revolution, really: “Puce is a color that’s been around for as long as we’ve been spilling blood and watching it dry, but it didn’t get a name until the summer of 1775 when French dressmaker Rose Bertin made Marie-Antoinette a gown in a color that blurred the lines between brown and maroon with only a hint of pinkish-gray.”

“Bouvier, who is Swiss, made his reputation as a businessman involved with freeports, the largely tax-free storage depots where wealthy collectors now store so many of their treasures.” But he’s battling in courtrooms across the world, including against a Russian billionaire who claims Bouvier committed fraud.

“Several Old Master paintings have turned up just this year. In July, two frescoes in the Vatican thought to be the work of Raphael’s students were determined be by the master himself. In October, a New Jersey town announced that a bust of Napoleon Bonaparte, on display for over 80 years in the council chambers of a local borough hall, was actually a long-lost work by Auguste Rodin.” Why are we only discovering them now? Partly, it’s because of newly-available technology, and partly it’s – well, it’s dirt.

“Landscape designer Walter Hood talks about his vision for the International African American Museum, which is scheduled to open in Charleston, South Carolina next year.”