Category: visual

The UK’s The Guardian asked a whole bunch of artists what they think, and the answers range across just about everything non-artists might think – and some very specific to making art in a time when public funding is drying up and artists need to stay true to themselves while also figuring out how to pay rent and eat (so, same as always, but with drones).

Really? Yes: Just weeks before the London Memorial’s design competition winner is announced, “the Imperial War Museum (IWM) is calling for the plan for an educational complex below the memorial to be reconsidered because it will compete with its own new Holocaust centre, opening in 2020, less than a mile away.”

Jeffrey Gibson says that earlier, “Every studio visit I had turned into me doing Native American Art 101. … People came in with zero to no knowledge. It was simplistic. So I wasn’t developing myself.” But things changed to “a complex cocktail of beauty and ugliness” after he and his husband moved away from Brooklyn, bought an old schoolhouse, and had a child.

A new exhibit is centered on the artist’s decision to center his Sephardic Jewish identity-
a choice, because “Modigliani, a half-Italian, half-French Jew growing up in a nation equated with Roman Catholicism (Vatican City wouldn’t become its own state until nine years after Modigliani’s death), was a cultural mixed bag from the get-go.”

Anna Maria Maiolino says, “Women have always been prohibited from speaking in the first person. … A woman is never the universal.” The artist’s developmental years paralleled the Brazilian military dictatorship, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. And yes, she responded: “In a photo installation from 1974 on view at both MOCA and the Hammer, she depicts herself wielding a pair of scissors, about to cut off her nose and her tongue.”

“I see the ideas of Morton Feldman’s music everywhere in Steven’s magnificent realization—and not just in the rugs of the Music Building that reproduce the graphic notation of Feldman’s early works. Steven’s architecture embodies the spirit of Feldman’s expansive and mystical late works.”

In reality, this latest New Leonardo Discovery is a warm-up of an old, on-the-record, attribution. In 1988 Jacques Franck, the art historian/painter trained in Old Master techniques (and a current restoration adviser to the Louvre), had closely examined the Joconde nue in the Château of Chantilly along with Amélie Lefébure, former Head curator of the Musée Condé, and Dominique Le Marois, a restorer in the French museums.

For example, in 2015 a small New Jersey auction house offered for a few hundred dollars what it thought was an anonymous 19th-century painting; Bertrand Talabardon was pretty sure it was an early Rembrandt – and he was right. Nina Siegal looks at the ‘sleeper’ phenomenon and the culture around so-called “sleeper-spotters.”

As controversy swirls around demands to remove the memorials to the Confederacy and its officers found in many US cities, it’s worth remembering that a lot of those statues “were cheap, mass-produced and exactly the kind of disgrace that [the great memorial sculptor Augustus] Saint-Gaudens condemned. With this in mind, we asked five specialists in American sculpture to select the pieces they regard as the nation’s truly great works.” (For better or worse, all five are in the Northeast Corridor.)

Last week the museum removed three pieces from the exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” following pressure from animal-rights activists; countercriticism followed from artists, curators, and anti-censorship activists. Now Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong has explained his decision: “It was not only the quantity of people’s reactions, but there were a number of them that bordered on ominously threatening, or beyond that. We were obliged to consult with the police.”