Category: visual

“Linda St. Thomas, a Smithsonian spokeswoman, points out that the noose (one of two found in or near a Smithsonian museum this week) is in the possession of the Park Police and instrumental to a criminal investigation. Incorporating it into the museum would also set unwanted precedents and give hatemongers unwanted power over determining the content of the museum’s collection. And some would no doubt see incorporating it in the Smithsonian holdings as a kind of honor paid to the object itself. But this is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Smithsonian does, a misunderstanding worth pondering for a moment.”

“On Wednesday Tate said it received 478,082 visitors. That averages at 4,300 visitors each day. Almost 35,000 advance tickets were sold before it even opened, more than any other show in Tate history. Demand to see it led to Tate Britain opening until midnight on Friday, Saturday and Sunday of its final weekend.“

What the students found was that in the 2016–17 season, 80.5% of all artists at the top 45 New York galleries were white, though if the statistics are parsed to focus only on US artists, then the percentage climbs to 88.1%. In a country that’s 64% white, that’s a drastic difference.

 

 

“Everywhere else in Europe does it. We know it makes sense. Charging is valuing. It is hardly a mortal sin.” Simon Jenkins makes the case.

“Central to both cases” – Dana Schutz’s Open Casket, over which there was a noisy controversy at the Whiney Biennial, and Sam Durant’s Scaffold, now being removed from the Walker Art Center’s sculpture garden – “are issues of cultural appropriation and artistic freedom. Should white artists, no matter how well intentioned, represent harrowing stories that are not their own to tell? Conversely, should any subject matter be off-limits to artists because of their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or other life experiences?”

Here is a Rothko that isn’t a Rothko, a Coco Chanel suit that isn’t a Chanel, a Babe Ruth baseball glove that the Babe never set eyes on, and let’s not forget all the silver by Alt-Paul Revere. You name it, and Treasures on Trial: The Art and Science of Detecting Fakes probably doesn’t have it, but it might have something that might be. In the immortal words of master forger Elmyr de Hory: “If my work hangs in a museum long enough, it becomes real.”

Roughly 20 to 30 full-time employees in New York, including editors, ad sales and office workers, were told last week that they were all being terminated in two weeks — but could “reapply” for their jobs as contract freelancers. Louise Blouin’s mini-art publishing empire, which includes Modern Painters, Art + Auction and the Web site Blouinartinfo.com, has struggled financially in recent years.

Sam Durant’s piece Scaffold, based partly on the gallows at which 38 Dakota men were hanged in 1862, was greeted with outrage by Native Americans when it appeared in the Walker’s about-to-reopen sculpture garden. It will now be taken apart and burned in a ceremony overseen by Dakota elders.

Yes, strange as it may seem, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art had not ever had a curator position dedicated to contemporary art – which (this is key) the museum defines as “the art of the 21st century.” The job goes to international curator Eungie Joo.

“In an act of protest” against the installation of Fearless Girl, which he considers a corporate marketing stunt, artist Alex Gardega “has created a small sculpture of a urinating dog to sit beside the popular feminist sculpture, which was meant to be a response to the Charging Bull sculpture. The Pissing Pug statue urinates directly on the girl’s left foot.”