Category: visual

“An unlikely group of experts—art conservators—have banded together to do what they can, manning a 24-hour hotline that offers practical methods to treat water-damaged art. A small army of volunteers is also on standby to survey the damage in person after the skies clear.”

Andrew Hunter’s mission was to make the AGO relevant to the world outside its doors in a deep and real way. For maybe the first time in its history, it is. The gallery’s task now, with two key positions now vacant — Hunter’s, and the role of chief curator — is to decide whether to maintain course, or chart a new direction. It does the latter at its peril.

“In architecture, that conversation has remained stunted. Who designed the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, Welton Becket or Louis Naidorf? Just how much was the architecture of L.A. firm Morphosis affected when co-founder Michael Rotondi departed in 1991, leaving Thom Mayne without the humanizing balance his partner tended to provide? Did Renzo Piano’s designs lose some elegance when the brilliant structural engineer Peter Rice, a longtime collaborator, died in 1992? Did Frank Gehry’s work change appreciably when Edwin Chan left Gehry’s office in 2011?”

“I pulled out all the public records for results in 2014 of London galleries, and I presented [the data] anonymously. It was really interesting because more than half of the galleries were in red. Which I think is one of the problems now: that of keeping up appearances and not being honest and open to your artists.”

“It was finally recovered last month, and investigators are focusing on several theories. And one of them is, in its own way, extraordinary: They are trying to determine if the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher — something of a renaissance man — who donned women’s clothing and took his son along as his accomplice, and then hung the masterwork in the bedroom of his own rural New Mexico home, where it remained. In other words, they are examining whether he stole a painting now valued at in excess of $100 million simply so he could enjoy it.”

The photos, which show a series of portraits of people in Thailand, were changed slightly by Madeleine Fierze and entered into the competition under the title “I look at the world with the eyes of a child”. In July, she scooped the top award in the “Fine Art People Children” non-professional category, but her award was called into question when Sasin Tipchai noticed his photos had been copied at the end of August.

“Almost a decade ago, these artists—freelancers who face stiff competition for 15 slots each week in the print magazine—could count on licensing deals for substantial passive income. Some received monthly checks as high as $8,000; others regularly saw one or two thousand dollars. Today, even those who saw the highest royalties receive only a few hundred dollars per month.”

“Art fairs represent as much as one quarter of total annual art sales worldwide—the figure is slightly over $13 billion annually. And fairs account for over 40 percent of most galleries’ annual revenue. Total art fair attendance numbers are in the millions and will only increase. If we accept that fairs are a kind of new cultural institution, cultural institutions of the future, say, then we should ask ourselves: What do we want these new cultural institutions to look like and how can they serve this diverse and growing audience?”

Madeleine Josephine Fierz of Switzerland won a gold medal at the Moscow International Foto Awards for a series of images of young Thais which she titled “I look at the world with the eyes of a child.” Turns out they were the work of a Thai photographer, and Fierze downloaded them from Pixabay.