Category: visual

The piece, called “Scaffold,” was meant to commemorate the gallows where 38 Dakota people were hanged in 1862 – but Minnesota’s Native American communities said it was insensitive and a trivialization of history and genocide. “Sheldon Wolfchild, a Dakota traditional elder who has strong family connections to the Dakota 38, said the decision to erect such a sculpture was proof that Minnesotans need to be reeducated on history.”

From Berta Colón’s letter to the board, in which she accused a co-executive of employee intimidation: “Staff is threatened with the possibility of being fired, they are pitted against each other. … During this period of transition without an executive director, Carlos has created an environment that promotes distrust, fear of retaliation and isolation.” And the museum’s newly hired executive director may not yet have permission to work in the U.S.

Yusaku Maezawa has a collection of Basquiats, and a lot of other art, and plans to open a museum in Japan to showcase it all – and to lend art to other museums as well. “Mr. Maezawa — who does not work with an art adviser — said he was driven entirely by his love of art and not financial investment. ‘I just follow my instinct,’ he said. ‘When I think it’s good, I buy it.'”

One of the heirs of the pre-Nazi-looting owners: “We brokered a compromise, which we signed. It is not really satisfactory, but it is acceptable. It was the best that we could achieve. Ideally, it would have been returned in total to our family. That wasn’t possible, so we settled for what we could get.”

“Italy has over the past two years recruited 20 highly-qualified new directors, seven of them foreigners, to shake up institutions which are richly-endowed with cultural treasures but often poorly run and badly promoted. But a regional court ruled that five of the appointments were null and void, saying that the selection process had not been transparent, that some interviews had been conducted via Skype and that the one foreigner appointed should never have been eligible.”

“In its new home, expect LACMA’s permanent collection to break all the rules. The permanent collection won’t exactly be permanent. LACMA instead plans to install the collection as a continuing series of temporary exhibitions — cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. An impermanent permanent collection, the scheme is unprecedented.”

“One thing that makes it a sculpture is that there’s obviously artifice to it. It is artifice posing as a natural phenomenon. It’s obviously been made, but the fiction is that it hasn’t been made. That tension is an important part of the work.”

James Turrell will have nine different immersive light installations. Jenny Holzer will be showing 200 silk-screened paintings and 21 stone paintings as well as several LED displays, all (of course) featuring text. Laurie Anderson will be playing with virtual reality.

Koons based the 45-foot-tall inflatable, currently installed at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, on his 2015 stainless-steel sculpture of the same name. It turns out that both of them bear the proverbial striking resemblance to a porcelain titled Balerina Lenochka by Oksana Zhnikrup and the The Kiev Experimental Ceramic-Art Factory. (A Koons representative has subsequently claimed that he copied Zhnikrup’s work “under license”; no details of this license were provided.)

“The Musée Dapper in Paris will close its doors next month, with officials citing high costs and low attendance as reasons for shutting the privately funded, non-profit museum of traditional and contemporary African art.”