Category: visual

Artist Dianna Cohen says that oceanographer Sylvia Earle helped inspire her to found her biggest art project: A non-profit that’s working on cleaning up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Kennicott: “If there’s a safe center to the cutting edge, the Obamas seem sure to find it. Like the Obamas’ personal presentation, the paintings are almost sure to look a lot tailored and just a little trendy, without crossing any lines that might discomfit popular expectations.”

Sitting down, in a museum, can be an almost radical act: a refusal to flow along with the distracted crowd, idly passing by art as if it was just one more stream of visual enticement in a visually saturated world. A good sit is all about committing to the depth, not the breadth, of the art itself, seeing more by deciding to see less.

“The newly refurbished Tate St Ives – which reopens this week (14 October) following an ambitious four-year building project – should draw an extra 50,000 visitors and raise an extra £10.5m annually for the local economy, says the executive director, Mark Osterfield. The waterfront venue, nestled into the rock face, has enlarged its exhibition spaces, adding almost 600 sq. m of new galleries. Tate St Ives opened in 1993 and draws around 250,000 visitors each year.”

“Though the hammer’s coming down on a major price in front of a crowd is good for headlines, auction houses have dealt with the pressures of the business by branching out. Private sales are increasingly important to the bottom line, as are advisory businesses — the auction houses help a collector manage her treasures, for instance, or broker acquisitions for museums.”

“As one-off fees, you might say, ‘that’s not so bad’. But consider that your average art history PhD will have dozens, if not perhaps hundreds, of images, then soon even an unpublished PhD can become prohibitively expensive. You want to discuss mid-18th Century portraiture, and show perhaps 50 images? That’ll be £750. You want to turn that PhD into a book? £3050 please, before you’ve even thought of printing costs. Want to put on a Hogarth exhibition, with a decent catalogue? £8600. Ouch. And Tate are on the cheaper end of the scale.”

The superstar performance artist had hired starchitect Rem Koolhaas to convert a former theater she had bought in Hudson, NY into the Marina Abramović Institute for the Preservation of Performance Art. But Koolhaas’s design would cost an estimated $31 million to realize, and Abramović has determined that she can’t raise that much money. (Ah, well – at least she has a new sideline in patisserie.)

Two Boston-area couples who have been collecting 17th-century Dutch and Flemish art for decades are donating a total of 113 works – including canvases by Rembrandt, van Dyck, and Rubens – along with funding and library materials for a new Center for the Study of Netherlandish Art.

“A Colorado couple has dropped a federal lawsuit that sought to stop the Manhattan district attorney’s office from returning to the Republic of Lebanon an ancient marble bull’s head that prosecutors said had been looted during that country’s civil war. … The 2,300-year-old sculpture had been on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art until July when the museum turned it over to authorities.”