Category: visual

An old Dupont Circle trolley station, unused for decades, has been turned into a subterranean art space called Dupont Underground that draws more than 3,000 visitors a month (so far).

“What they found is that all the plans adhere to one of five basic setups: benches opposing each other in two sets of lines; a semicircle; a horseshoe; a circle; or a classroom-like layout, where politicians are rigidly oriented to face the front of a room. While many European national parliaments have opted for the semicircular layout — indicative of a “consensus-seeking” room, XML says — it’s mostly authoritarian countries that have adopted the classroom setup, from Cuba to China to North Korea.”

“Modern Painters, Old Masters argues persuasively that artists have succeeded in reimagining earlier work without engaging in aggressive competition—the kind that Édouard Manet, for example, appears to have relished when he transformed the softly modeled nude in Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) into the flat planes of a defiantly naked Olympia (1863)… Like the nineteenth century, our own moment is one at which the expansion of museums and new technologies for the dissemination of images have combined to make the history of art-making open to view as never before.”

Noah Charney, co-editor of the Journal of Art Crime, fills us in on the tombaroli (Italian tomb looters who emerged in the 1970s), how they get their looted antiquities onto the market (the story has a villain named Medici), and how museums do (or don’t) check the objects’ provenance.

The towering, untitled sculpture was not universally popular when it was unveiled 50 years ago. “[It] might never have been in danger of being destroyed or being replaced with a statue of Cubs baseball player Ernie Banks (per the wishes of one alderman), but for several years, the word ‘controversial’ preceded any mention of the work in the press. … Children began using The Picasso as a slide almost immediately, making it a de facto interactive sculpture.”

The animatronic arachnid, called Kumo, was created by French street theater company La Machine and brought to Ottawa for the Canada 150 celebrations. Late last week, it was was installed on the side of the capital’s Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica – for a visual juxtaposition with Louise Bourgeois’s bronze spider, Maman, just across the street in front of the the National Gallery of Canada. But not all believers thought the sight was cool.

“Authorities arrested five Palestinian antiquities dealers in Jerusalem and confiscated items dating back thousands of years from their homes and shops: papyrus fragments from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the bust of an Etruscan woman, a fresco from Pompeii depicting swimming fish. They also seized more modern objects – two black luxury Audi vehicles – and more than $200,000 in cash.”

High in the Apuan Alps of Tuscany sits Monte Altissimo, a 5,213-foot (1,589-meter) mountain, climbed in 1517 by the Italian artist Michelangelo in pursuit of fine marble for his sculptures. There, according to Reuters, he “found the marble of his dreams. It was, the Renaissance master wrote, ‘of compact grain, homogeneous, crystalline, reminiscent of sugar.’”

The National Academy artists wrote in response to Boston protesters asking the ICA to cancel the Schutz show because of her painting Open Casket, which is of the open casket and broken face of Emmett Till and was roundly criticized at the Whitney Biennial. The painting is not in the ICA show. The artists wrote, “It is also of the utmost importance to us that artists not perpetrate upon each other the same kind of intolerance and tyranny that we criticise in others.”