Category: visual

“Michel Draguet, the director-general of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and Laurence des Cars, the director of Paris’s Musée de l’Orangerie, are among the four candidates shortlisted for the post of director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. The successful applicant will replace Guy Cogeval who has led the museum since 2008.”

“Random International’s Rain Room, the large-scale, interactive installation in which visitors experience an artificial downpour but never get wet, has been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.”

“The 20-inch gilded bronze statue was taken from a Buddhist temple on Tsushima, a Japanese island halfway between the two countries, by South Koreans who also stole another statue from a Shinto shrine there.” But a historic temple on the Korean coast argued that the idol had been looted by Japanese pirates in the 14th century, and a court in Daejeon agreed.

“This country has some of the strongest art institutions, best-known artists, and the most (and arguably the best) arts professionals in the world, yet the divide between the art community and the American public is something people are constantly trying to figure out. Maybe part of the appeal of American art is the constant desire by artists, curators, and other arts professionals here to expand the audience. What these stats don’t tell us is how we’re going to do that.”

“Computational photography takes a swarm of data from images or image sensors and combines it algorithmically to produce a photo that would be impossible to capture with film photography or digital photography in its more conventional form. Image data can be assembled across time and space, producing super-real high-dynamic range (HDR) photos—or just ones that capture both light and dark areas well.”

“It is easy access to self-portraiture, probably, that makes the educated uneasy about it. The fact that we all carry high-quality cameras and the ability to instantly exhibit our work globally has made every goofball tourist an international artist. It’s embarrassing when they don’t respect sombre memorials to serious things, yes. But resistance to self-promotion generally is mere snobbery.”

“The study reports museums across the country have fairly diverse revenue streams, with endowment income (22%), combined college/university and federal, state and local government support (18%) and individual and family contributions (11%) accounting for over half of all revenue. Admissions revenue accounts for just 6% of revenue, on par with Individual & Family memberships, and just behind contributions from Foundations & Trusts (7%). Corporate contributions and memberships, benefit events, facility rentals, restaurants and catering and exhibition fees all make up between 1–4%, respectively.”

“Michaelina Wautier is probably the first woman who successfully painted works in nearly all the genres – portraits, history pictures, still-lifes and scenes of everyday life. At that time most successful Flemish female artists specialised in flower compositions.”

Protests have broken out since the city’s government announced earlier this month that it was turning over custody of St. Isaac’s Cathedral, a 19th-century gem that was made into a museum by the Soviets, to the Russian Orthodox Church. Secular Russians fear that the church may not be a careful steward of the UNESCO World Heritage Site. (Tensions went even higher after parliament deputy speaker Pyotr Tolstoy, Leo’s great-grandson, gave a speech criticizing the protests that was widely interpreted as anti-Semitic.)