Category: visual

In late May, all the editorial staff of Artinfo and Louise Blouin’s other art puiblications (Modern Painters, Art + Auction) were given two weeks’ notice and told they could reapply as freelancers. Then, reports Page Six, “owner Louise Blouin outsourced the editorial to India. But to make it seem as if there were still a cosmopolitan staff, articles were given bylines with hilariously generic international names.”

“Earlier this week, the foundation sponsoring the Genoa show decided to shut down exhibit three days early in order to collaborate with latest investigation enveloping the Italian expressionist painter and sculptor, who is one of the world’s most famously faked artists.”

“With prices for some Chinese antiquities reaching into the tens of millions of dollars, a flood of amateur and professional thieves looking to get rich quick has hit China’s countryside. While accurate figures are difficult to come by, the looting has resulted in the permanent destruction of numerous Chinese cultural heritage sites.”

“The French museum confirmed that water had invaded the mezzanine of the Denon wing, affecting the “Arts of Islam” and “From the Mediterranean Orient to Roman Times” rooms, both of which have been closed pending hygrometric stabilization. Water also entered the first floor of the Sully wing, affecting the “Salle des Sept-Cheminées” and Henri IV staircase, and the second floor of the Cour Carrée, affecting some rooms housing French paintings.”

“I realized that our paradigm of understanding how people experience their environments had radically shifted, and no one had really figured out what this meant. One of the things I found was that, basically, [given] what we now know about human cognition and perception, the built environments we inhabit are drastically more important than we ever thought they were.”

For instance: “The U.S. Department of Energy proposed to use an image of the face at the nuclear waste repository in Nevada’s Yucca Mountain to warn future explorers of radioactive waste.”

“Surprised that the tour guide was also a painter, Saskia Leefsma, one of the visitors in the group, asked, ‘Do you have a studio now?’ Mr. Mukasa admitted that no, this was the very first painting he’d made in a very long while because he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Praying hands and candle emojis were banned from Weibo, but artists found creative ways to post. “Some posted the works of Liu Xiaobo’s poet and artist widow Liu Xia, who remains under house arrest, depicting mutilated dolls positioned in bleak landscapes. Paintings of empty chairs referenced the empty seat at Liu Xiaobo’s 2010 ceremony for the Nobel Peace Prize, which the Chinese government refused to release him to receive.”

For instance, stop saying Hobby Lobby was funding ISIS: That’s not true, but also, “in West Asia, most looting and most damage to cultural heritage generally is not being carried out by ISIS. This is not to belittle the horrible acts culminating in murderous violence that are committed by ISIS. Rather, the problem is ignoring the massive scale of threats to cultural heritage by focusing solely on one entity.”