Category: visual

The Great Salt Lake is drying up at a worrisome rate.

While the painting, Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer II, was hanging at MoMA last year (she lent it anonymously in 2014), David Geffen approached her to say that Larry Gagosian had a buyer lined up. (Gossip!) And she made quite a profit.

Last year the auction house discovered that the Portrait of a Gentleman that it had sold to a collector in 2011 was a forgery – and it reimbursed that collector. So Sotheby’s is taking dealer Mark Weiss to court to get its money back.

“The Paddington cube offends every principle of a conservation area. It demolishes old buildings. It pays no respect to the district’s character, brutalising it with one overpowering structure. Westminster’s own published plan for the area stipulates that “tall buildings could not be accommodated without detriment to the townscape”. As for flexible uses, the collapse of the luxury property market means that the cube is entirely for commercial use.”

The piece by Manaf Halbouni, described as a “Monument” to Aleppo and its people, consists of three buses stood on end in front of Dresden’s restored Frauenkirche. The city is the home base of the anti-immigration group Pegida.

“In a blog post on Wikimedia, Richard Knipel, the Met’s “Wikimedian-in-Residence,” stated the goal of the initiative was to “Wiki-fy the Met, and Met-ify the Wiki.” The museum is currently planning edit-a-thons and further efforts to update the data entries for each work. Among the institutions helping with the Open Access program are Pinterest, the popular picture-sharing social media platform, and Artstor, the online database for images of artworks used mainly by academics and researchers.”

“Stripped to the absolute bare necessities, the artists of De Stijl promoted a design reminiscent of the contemporary web, with clean lines, solid colors, and simplicity. But how could a hundred-year-old movement influence contemporary digital design?” Here’s how.

Colby College’s Museum of Art is already the largest in the state of Maine, thanks in large part to previous gifts by Peter and Paula Lunder of a major collection of American art (itself worth $100 million) and of 100 Picasso etchings. Now the Lunders have made another gift of 1,500 works ranging from Rembrandt to van Gogh to Whistler to Ai Weiwei.

“I think elevating something as iconic, in some circles, as the Spiral Jetty to be our official state work of art could bring it more into the mainstream consciousness of all Utahns,” Rep. Mike Winder, R-West Valley City, said.

That’s not the only plan in The Hague for the 100-year anniversary of the founding of Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg’s De Stijl: “Brinkman said the city planned to adorn other buildings with similar Mondrian-inspired works, including floating cubical pontoons on the Hofvijver, the small lake in front of the centuries-old Dutch parliament.”