Category: visual

“The collector and hedge fund titan Steven A. Cohen and his wife, Alexandra Cohen, are the latest big-money contributors to the Museum of Modern Art’s capital campaign for new exhibition space. The institution announced today that the couple’s foundation has given $50 million in unrestricted funds.”

Stephan Salisbury looks at a little-known part of Wyeth’s work: portraits of the historic African-American community (dating to before the Civil War) just down the hill from his home in Chadds Ford, Pa.

“For years [François] Pinault, a self-made man whose luxury group had acquired a string of the world’s most famous fashion brands, from Yves Saint Laurent to Gucci, has been searching for a Paris home for his €1.25bn art collection of more than 3,500 works, including pieces by Mark Rothko to Damien Hirst. … Now Pinault is making his long-anticipated renewed bid to create a museum by renovating and restoring the former Paris stock exchange, the 19th-century Bourse de commerce – one of Paris’s most historically important but least known buildings.”

Not that Nutella needed help on the shelf, but … “The algorithm pulls from a database of dozens of patterns and colors to create seven million different versions of the Nutella label — pink and green, striped and polka-dotted, Pop Art-inspired and minimal.”

Where the brutalist designs of the 1960s meant to give the complex an aura of “high art,” the ethos of 2017 means opening up, warming up, inviting people in, including many people who don’t have tickets and never will have tickets to events inside. But Alex Bozikovic asks, “What if, 50 years from now, every public building is a glass pavilion with a humming espresso machine and slightly dated modern furniture? What if cloistered, dramatic public spaces are again in vogue”?

“In the mid-2000s, Dafen’s copy industry was booming. It was at this point that auxiliary commercial avenues began to take root in the village. Quaint cafes, as well as more accessible ‘gallery shops’ (predominantly fronts for anonymous art workers and addresses from which to tout for business both wholesale and retail) lent the village lucrative tourist appeal.” But things have changed. Can Dafen become a creative hub instead of a copy factory?

It’s not a pleasant trend, whether it’s in London, New York or Los Angeles. Indeed, as more small and mid-size galleries merge or close, “some see the solidifying of a class society.”

Artist Anthony Goicolea: “It feels like there are certain shapes and patterns that are encoded in our DNA as humans that transcend any particular culture and speak to how we are unified in the larger scheme,” he said. “I wanted to create a space that feels familiar, even though it is new.”

There are several phases of construction planned, but “perhaps the most striking feature of the planned expansion is the creation of a vast, light-filled entry hall where the current courtyard and Bunshaft galleries exist. Renderings show the space as a glass-walled public plaza with an elevated walkway providing access to the existing auditorium on the south side and a new restaurant that will spill onto the east lawn of the gallery in the summer months.”