Category: visual

Some collectors have responded to the resulting existential malaise by deliberately collecting art that is difficult to live with, refusing the notion of art-as-investment and embracing work that is not easy on any level, art that until recently would only have found a home in a well-financed institution that had the resources to maintain it. These are works that are difficult not merely in a conceptual sense but in reality as well, works that require as much time and energy as they do money, works that are ephemeral and unwieldy and often extremely messy. This is the sort of art that can die, rot, dry up or just disappear.

This is what happens when you let dirt – and overpainting – obscure the original. “The portrait showing George Villiers, the first Duke of Buckingham, thought to have been James VI and I’s lover, had been hanging in a National Trust for Scotland property and was believed to be a copy of the lost original, which had been missing for almost 400 years.”

Jean Nouvel, speaking of the workers who built his museum – and despite a 2015 report that says the workers were badly abused – said, “They have the same conditions, even better conditions, than those I see in other countries. … We checked and it was fine. We saw no problem.”

Truly an unlikely story: “Unlike many collectives that disbanded post-eviction, members of the Trapp managed to pull off a miracle in Oakland’s increasingly tight real estate market: They convinced a warehouse owner to let them build out a new live/work space and do it legally.”

The letterer’s art is to make it look like no art at all. “Though their work is essential to the look and feel of a book, it also tends to disappear into the page itself.”

Many people see the artists as the first wave of development and gentrification, of course. “Tensions have simmered for much of the past decade between Bushwick’s longtime Latino and African American residents and artists who moved into the area. But as more people discover the neighborhood’s charms, investors pour money into projects that increase property values and eventually force long-time residents and artists to leave for good.”

Think about this when you see artists on Instagram: “Artists always make spectacular choices in terms of what they are going to wear – it’s part of the gallery game, a game of seduction with the collectors. They are buying you as much as they are buying the work. It’s one of the rare occasions where the class system is subverted. Nobody is going to remember you because you died with a billion dollars, but they will remember your collection. Jean Michel was acutely aware of that. His whole life as a black man in the art world was a performance.”

The Huntington’s senior paintings conservator, Christina O’Connell, has a plan. “The Blue Boy will be reframed and returned to the portrait gallery on November 1. It will remain there for 10 months while O’Connell processes reams of data and formulates her treatment plan. Then the painting will come down for another several months of treatment. Part of this work will be done in the lab, but as much as possible will be completed in a cordoned-off area of the portrait gallery, in full view of the visiting public.”

Sure, if by that you mean where the world’s wealthy come to play. “At its media preview last Friday, two of the first questions from South African journalists raised awkward points about Cape Town’s reputation as an unequal and inaccessible playground for the wealthy. The city is arguably one of the least African cities on the continent. And its apartheid geography has persisted, with blacks and whites still largely in their separate and unequal enclaves.”

One curator: “It’s as if taking a photo of a work in a museum means ‘seeing’ it to a viewer, even though someone like me worries that taking the photo replaces seeing it in the slow and thoughtful way I would ideally wish. … And the problem with all the photo-takers is that they make it impossible for someone who wants to do that kind of looking to do so.”