Category: visual

Once neon symbolised vulgarity, sleaze, Las Vegas. Now it symbolises art. Artists have made luminous commercial signage so much their own that the new wave of neon in popular culture consciously apes that artiness.

Two museums whose patronage is supermajority white in a city that’s 80 percent African American combine with a museum that has more appeal to the city’s Black residents in a bid to get Millennials interested in what did happen – and what can happen again. One curator said, “This occurred, and pay attention, because it can happen again.”

Here’s a model that could prove sustainable in the middle of the crazed art fair cycle: “At a modest cost of $2,500—the rent divided between the five galleries—each space effectively gets a four-month presence in Los Angeles, as opposed to four days at an art fair.”

Facing massive blowback, including from Norman Rockwell’s sons, “Berkshire Museum officials held their ground, citing decades of financial losses that, in recent years, amounted to million-dollar annual budget shortfalls on a yearly budget of $2.4 million. The institution had struggled with deficits for 30 years, they said, and needed to fundamentally reinvent itself — or face closure within eight years.”

A man who buys art in estate sales snagged the entire contents of a house – and that happened to include the “Woman-Ochre,” stolen from the University of Arizona Museum of Art in the 1980s. He was going to hang it in his own house until people in his shop noticed it was a de Kooning – and a Google search led him to the truth.

He cut off his Jewish friends after the Dreyfus Affair, and he read a nationalist, anti-Semitic newspaper, and as the 21st century deals with the fact that we haven’t actually left murderous racism behind, “it also becomes harder to relegate Degas’ inhumanity to an artifact of a time when racism and bigotry were more acceptable. His cruelty becomes, instead, an indelible component of his artistry.”

“The Met’s website has seen a 64 percent increase in image downloads since Open Access was implemented, as well as a 17 percent bump in traffic to the online collection. Users who download photographs are now spending five times as long on the site.”

“Soldiers and sailors have been stitching masterpieces of the sewing crafts for hundreds of years. It was a longstanding tradition that during lulls in fighting, while prisoners of war or over extended hospital visits, they would hand-stitch quilts, wool work seascapes and embroider their own uniforms.” And some of the pieces they made are quite elaborate.

“Six of those now-famous paintings survive, five in public collections … Alas for aficionados, those five publicly held Sunflowers are scattered over three continents and have never been seen together. But Thursday morning, their isolation ended, so to speak, when a ‘virtual exhibition’ reunited the Arles Sunflowers on Facebook in a single cyber-gallery – dubbed Sunflowers 360 – creating the illusion that they are hanging in a single space.”

This past spring, Sam Durant’s Scaffold at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis drew enough criticism that the piece was disassembled entirely. (At least they held off on burning it.) This month, the dispute is over Del Geist’s Bowfort Towers, a piece, meant to pay tribute to Blackfoot culture, that the city of Calgary has sited at an interchange on the Trans-Canada Highway.