Category: visual

“Even the restrooms are covered in polka dots.” Motoko Rich meets the artist and tours the five-story museum, which opens October 1. (Timed tickets are already sold out through November.)

The competition was founded by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos’s son and is heavily funded by her family, the leading philanthropists in ArtPrize’s location, Grand Rapids, Mich. While the event’s officials say that the family’s influence on operations and choice of participants is minimal, “‘Any artwork put into ArtPrize is going to be about ArtPrize, the DeVoses and Trump,’ said Eric Millikin, an artist in Detroit whose entry, Made of Money, used a weave of actual dollar bills and digital manipulation to produce portraits of accomplished people who died poor.”

Augustus Casely-Hayford is a force in London’s cultural scene, working as a curator, broadcaster and adviser with many organizations, including the Tate Britain, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the British Library. He created “The Lost Kingdoms of Africa” for the BBC; a six-part series for Sky Arts, “Tate Britain: Great British Walks”; and is working on films on landscape art. His book on Timbuktu and the rise of the Mali Empire will be published next year.

“As the Studio Museum prepares to break ground [on 125th Street] next year, coinciding with its 50th anniversary, [Thelma] Golden, 52, is overseeing the institution at a turning point in its history. … Ms. Golden’s name, meanwhile, keeps coming up for top posts, like those at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the same time, Ms. Golden must defend the Studio Museum’s importance in an age when the work of African-American artists is increasingly making its way into mainstream institutions.”

“Museum leaders gathered Tuesday morning to release details of the $38 million expansion that will – when finished in summer 2019 – nearly double its total exhibition space. The biggest addition is a new 8,500 square-foot, column-less exhibition pavilion” designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm wHY. The pavilion will be named for museum board chair Akiko Yamazaki and her husband, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, who have contributed $25 million for the project.

Claiming that it had received threats of violence well beyond what it had encountered in the past, the Guggenheim pulled three pieces from its exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” – only to come under a new round of criticism from artists, curators, and PEN America for capitulating to “heightened political sensitivities that have been amplified by social media.”

The works, all by conceptual Chinese artists, came under fire last week when activists characterized them as “instances of unmistakable cruelty against animals in the name of art.” The criticism erupted after a measured preview of the show ran in The New York Times, titled “Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim.” The comments on the article, however, reflected the distress many experienced even before the show’s opening.

“Why should humans all choose roughly the same places to identify transitions, when color is just photons, irreducible quanta of light on a continuous spectrum of wavelengths? Linguists might say it’s because language creates cultural norms. Anthropologists might say it’s because some colors have more cultural relevance than others. Neuroscientists and physiologists might say it’s because of the specific light-sensitive cells in the primate eye tuned to pick up red, green, and blue wavelengths and send signals to the visual cortex—trichromatic vision.”

The end of New Deal subsidies led to a new wave of competition between artists, and the abstract-expressionist style expanded. The market for this new art was energized by a number of factors: the postwar period of inflation and the pent-up demand and incomes from the war led to a new cascade of collectors. Additionally, French art was no longer imported after 1944, and the European art market had been devastated by the war.

“That selfie audience has brought a virtual community activated via Instagram. Surely that entry point has been apart of our success. … There is some resistance to the selfies, but we’re stuck with it. … Isn’t every painting a selfie in some effect?”