“One can be taught—and one needs to be taught—how to look, how to put aside one’s prejudices, and one’s overly hasty negative reactions. For me, in some cases, it was a long learning process, and I have to imagine that for a majority of visitors it can’t be easy either. This is why I am so impatient with those who want to position their museum as a form of entertainment. The appreciation of art requires an engagement that is wholly different from the instant gratification provided by most forms of popular culture, and museums have a responsibility to help visitors achieve this.”
Category: visual
Banksy Offers Free Limited Edition Print To Britons Who Vote Against Tories
It’s probably illegal to take photos of your ballot in the UK, but Banksy wrote to people in six recent Conservative strongholds, “Simply send in a photo of your ballot paper from polling day showing you voted against the Conservative incumbent and this complimentary gift will be mailed to you.”
If You Give An Artist An Ellsworth Kelly Painting To Work Off Of, This Is What Can Result
Glenn Ligon took the Kelly painting “Blue Black” at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis and then pulled together a show that pulls together disparate artists in what Ligon calls “a meander.” He says, not being a curator, “I’m not bound by chronology or genre. It’s about encounters and collisions. I’m an artist, too. I have my work in juxtaposition with other work in the show. That’s a luxury I can do.”
Pope L. Wins The Whitney’s $100,000 Biennial Bucksbaum Award
It’s a pungent piece: “Pope.L staged Claim (Whitney Version), 2017, an immersive installation including 2,755 slices of bologna that, over the course of the show’s run, has cured and gradually leaked juices into basins at the bottom of the piece.”
Can You Name The Biggest Seller At Art Auctions? (It’s Not Picasso)
Zhang Daqian, a Chinese modernist painter who died in 1983, has almost $355 million in sales last year. He was a “prolific, much-traveled and much-faked artist, who himself delighted in faking Chinese masters.”
A Contractor Sues Dale Chihuly, Saying He Helped Create The Art
“Mr. Chihuly’s lawyers also on Friday told of the artist’s deteriorating mental state, and said the lawsuit was ‘nothing more than an ugly and reprehensible display of opportunism and exploitation’ by the man,” but “‘We never asked for silence,’ Mr. Moi’s lawyer, Anne Bremner, wrote in an email in response to a question about that allegation. ‘We asked for justice.'”
Mexico City’s Art Scene Is Absolutely Booming
The numbers of galleries, art fairs and other independent art spaces have soared. “Even as violence has saturated the country — federal statistics show that homicides jumped 22% from 2015 to 2016 and 35% the year prior — the Mexican capital, some of its neighborhoods insulated from violence by money and private security, has grown as an international cultural magnet.”
No, You Really Do *Not* Want To Hear Running Water In A Museum After Hours
At the Museum of Cultural and Natural History in Eugene on Wednesday night, “Cold water poured down from a broken humidifier on the roof of the museum, flowing behind a 4½-by-7-foot Ray Troll illustrated map of Oregon. Fast action by janitors and campus plumbers helped the museum avoid disaster.”
The White Colonial French Were Deeply Worried, So Propagandists Came Up With An Infantilized Image of Africa
To calm down the French, who were worried about arming some of those they controlled through colonialism, propagandists produced “a range of stereotypical images of the black African soldier, who was characterized as both heroic and strong, but still limited in his power, as in the Banania advertisements that suggest a subservient and harmless individual.”
Design For MoMA’s Expansion Rethinks Entire Approach To Displaying Art
“The final design for the Museum of Modern Art’s $400 million expansion project … is striking and provocative less because of its look than its implicit message: MoMA isn’t modern yet. Under the new plans, the museum is moving away from discipline-specific galleries that feature established artists – many of them white men – and toward more chronological and thematic approaches that include multiple formats as well as more minority and female artists.”