Category: visual

Conspiratorial “experts” like Jay Weidner assert that the airport’s murals and capstone prove the existence of a secret government plan for a “New World Order.” Others implicate the airport in the murder of JonBenét Ramsey. One local Evangelical Christian group, Cephas Ministries, claimed that the DIA was built as part of a plot to murder the “people that Lucifer hates.”

As the museum’s website describes the project, called “Send Me,” “Text 572-51 with the words ‘send me’ followed by a keyword, a color, or even an emoji and you’ll receive a related artwork image and caption via text message.” The Twitterverse is loving it.

Matthew Olson started with “send me a landscape” and was chagrined to receive Robert Gober’s Prison Window. (“What does it say about me that my landscape riffs on a prison cell?”) So he kept trying – and moved on to requests like “send me an idea” and “send me joy.” (The response to his final request, the notorious eggplant emoji, suggests that SFMOMA may need to tweak its algorithm a little.)

The frescoes in the Hall of Constantine were painted by Raphael’s students after the master died in 1520. But contemporary sources recorded that Raphael did complete two figures in the room – and the recent restoration of the frescoes helped scholars identify which ones they were.

The Dallas Museum of Art has acquired All the Eternal Love I Have for the Pumpkins, completed last year and Kusama’s first pumpkin-themed installation since 1991. The work goes on display Oct. 1.
 

“Turin’s Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art has obtained the legendary art collection of Francesco Federico Cerruti. … The iconic trove features 300 masterpieces from the Middle Ages to the 20th century accumulated by the enigmatic Italian collector. Extraordinary works by Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as Pontormo, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, René Magritte, Andy Warhol, and Guilio Paolini feature in the jaw-dropping collection, alongside various furnishings and rare and ancient books.”

Sophia Kishkovsky looks into the history of Soviet ceramicist Oksana Zhnikrup and the Kiev workshop-factory where she created the figurines – to which, by the way, Koons did, in fact, purchase rights.

Last week the company was fined $3 million for having purchased cuneiform tablets and other ancient items (which will be returned) apparently looted from Iraq for the museum’s collection. Here, Noah Charney writes about different allegations: that the Green family (Hobby Lobby’s owners) acquired papyrus fragments used to bind Egyptian mummies that had been removed from the bodies in order to get at early Scriptural texts written on the fragments.

“Detectives are hunting two men who calmly walked into the Masterpiece art show last week and unlocked a cabinet before stealing several pieces of diamond jewellery. The men, both white and casually dressed, then locked the cabinet at the stand of Swiss jewellers Boghossian before strolling away.”

By ‘finding’ a lost city from the air, archaeologists fail to understand the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience that communities have of their place and their past. The illusory ‘finding’ seems important. The ‘finding out’, the delayed gratification, is replaced by the immediacy of the ‘discovery’.