“Counters keep track of average visit duration in any space where we use them and by tracking at our main entrance, special exhibition, and collection gallery we have a sense of visit duration throughout the building on any given day and at any given time. This has given us the opportunity to manage queues effectively at high capacity events because we know roughly what the average stay rate is and how quickly those lines will move.”
Category: visual
‘Art Criticism Shouldn’t Be The Consumer Reports Of Art’ – Blake Gopnik On The Art Of Art Journalism
“I think art critics should be more like science journalists. We should be some kind of intermediary between the smartest people who talk about art, the smartest writing from art historians and the general public.” (podcast)
A New Tool To Fight Art Forgery And Fraud: Online Bots Trolling The Dark Web
“While several companies already exist to police artists’ copyright, few have the technical firepower to search the dark web for works that are potentially stolen or forged.” But a DC-based art forensics firm and Singapore-based specialists in online intellectual property violations have teamed up to develop that firepower.
Art Appraisers Who Lowball Values To Cheat The IRS
The I.R.S. has long viewed the valuations given for artworks in income, estate and gift tax returns as a “potentially high abuse area,” as described in several recent reports. It sometimes uses a group of dealers, museum curators and scholars, known as the Art Advisory Panel of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue, to advise the agency on works worth more than $50,000. According to annual reports by the panel, about 58 percent of the 1,840 works it reviewed from 2011 to 2015 were valued improperly.
For This (At Least) Don’t Blame The Russians, Judge Tells Sotheby’s Expert
A Sotheby’s expert valued a Bruegel painting (one generations of English speakers know from William Carlos Williams’ poem “The Dance”) at $500,000, but it sold for more than four times as much. Did the expert lowball it, or did Russians spike the auction price? The I.R.S. has an opinion.
Taking The Art Outside
There’s a “growing global trend among arts institutions that are trying to make an artistic statement while engaging visitors, both returning and new.” And that’s just the authorized projections.
Two Big Architecture Schools, Two Outgoing Deans, One (Neutral Territory) Meeting
Christopher Hawthorne interviews UCLA’s Hitoshi Abe and USC’s Qingyun Ma. One of the amusing exchanges:
“Dean Ma, you’ve been at USC during the presidency of C.L. Max Nikias, who’s been ambitious about raising money and building new facilities in a very consistent and conservative architectural style, which he calls Collegiate Gothic.
“Ma: This is where I made the decision not to bring my own personal design agenda to the job.”
The First House Gaudí Designed Is Soon To Become A Public Museum
The private home in Barcelona had been the residence of a single family for almost a century, but now it will be (another, but can you have too many?) museum about Gaudí.
Architecture As A Matter Of Conscience
Architectural commissions that once might have seemed benign look more and more like matters of conscience. We know, for instance, that greenfield development destroys wildlife habitats even as species extinctions are occurring at a catastrophic rate. We know that projects in the United Arab Emirates are being built with slave labor. We know that luxury housing in New York and other cities has become a vehicle for international money laundering.
The Art Market Is Brutal – For Gender Equity
From 2011 to 2016, just two in 100 of the top lots sold by living artists at auction were works by women. Of 2,300 artworks in the National Gallery, only 20 are by women, and none of the top ten richest living artists in the world are women.