Category: visual

“The diplomatic crisis will affect exhibitions as no art from Qatar can be exhibited in these Gulf countries right now. If anyone bought anything in Qatar—not only art works—it would not be easy to export to these countries either.”

As the middle market shrinks, many dealers are finding they can’t afford to do fairs—but they can’t afford not to, either. “It’s very hard to estimate what the revenue will be, so a gallery’s decision to do a fair is highly uncertain,” says Olav Velthuis, a professor at the University of Amsterdam who specializes in economic sociology. “People don’t realize that fairs are loss leaders for many small galleries.”

“In a striking leadership reorganization, the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Tuesday announced that Daniel H. Weiss, its president and chief operating officer, will lead and run the museum, filling the new, higher-ranking role of president and chief executive. And in a sign that fiscal responsibility now trumps artistic control, the museum’s next director, who oversees programming, will report to Mr. Weiss, rather than the other way around.”

“News of the painting arrives exclusively from a press release issued by an organization called News Press International (NPI), which also shared a video recap of the gallery event. … The only expert involved in this case who is identified is Curtis Dowling, an art forgery investigator. Perhaps you know him as host of CNBC’s reality TV series Treasure Detectives.”

“Animal-rights campaigners smashed windows and threw blue paint on the work space of Aboubakar Fofana in Athens … Fofana’s piece, Ka touba Farafina yé (Africa blessing) (2017), features 54 sheep – one for each country in Africa – that have their wool dyed in different shades of indigo. It deals with the ‘tragedy of migration’, Fofana says, using a sheep’s quest for new pastures as a symbol of humans risking their lives in search of a better one.”

After a controversial 2010 bailout package brought relations between Germany and Greece to a new low, organizers had said they hoped the festival would help mend relations between the two countries. However, the undertaking has largely failed to appeal to locals, and in the process has even alienated some. According to Yanis Varoufakis, the enigmatic former Greek finance minister who stepped down after pressure from European leaders forced Greece to accept harsh austerity measures in exchange for an international bailout package in 2015, Documenta’s arrival was nothing more than “crisis tourism.”

In retrospect, they were city-based but anti-urban projects, divorced from the streets, in thrall to cars. A mass of contradictions, Wright, the inexhaustible genius, was, in these as in so many other projects, a maker and mirror of the American century. His archives should keep scholars busy for at least the rest of the post-American one.

While authorities were aware that a small amount of looting had taken place, they did not realize the extent of the destruction until it was too late. The largest pyramid on the site of Nohmul (also known as Noh Mul), the most important Maya site in Belize, had been reduced to just a core of rubble.

When the beloved but impoverished Museum of Contemporary Craft closed abruptly, Portland suddenly had a hole in the popular, hopping Pearl District. Then last week, “Suddenly a space that had housed an important cultural center that had died before its time seemed alive with hope and possibilities again” as the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education opened, post-remodel, in the space.