Category: visual

“The landmark, which receives more paying tourists—around seven million a year—than any other monument in the world, was built as the centerpiece of the 1889 Universal Exposition. The planned refurbishment is intended to bolster the French capital’s bids to host another World’s Fair in 2025 and, before that, the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic games, according to a statement from the mayor’s office.”

Auction prices are a terrible way of judging the value of an artist. But they do tell you something about the demand for their work. Male artists command higher prices generally, but these six women are rising in the auction market.

In Peggy Sutton’s kitchen, she “has a framed a black-and-white sketch of the president she bought from a man for $1 at the 63rd Street beach. On the way to the lower level, she hung an oversize Ebony magazine cover of the black cool issue in which Mr. Obama exits a car wearing dark shades. Downstairs is a beaded Obama pillow. Upstairs on display in a spare bedroom is like Obama-palooza: homemade clothes, dollar bills with pictures of the president and the first lady, jeweled Obama champagne flutes, inauguration invitations.”

The renovations of Paris’ relatively young, and certainly most controversial, museum will be extensive – but they won’t change the look of the building, or (so hope the curators) force any closures as the work goes on.

The pick meant that Exposition Park keeps on transforming into less open space than building space, but it “also played to — and in the end confirmed — certain ideas Los Angeles has about itself, that it’s a city without a robust culture of civic engagement, that builds first and asks questions later, that pounces on opportunities like the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art rather than debating them.”

The first Houses of Parliament burned to the ground in 1834, and what we now photograph endlessly was finished rebuilding in 1860. But now, “a Westminster source said fire alarm cabling and systems were ‘so antiquated that they fail regularly and replacement parts are no longer available. The poor disabled access in the palace means emergency evacuation procedures for people with mobility impairments do not meet acceptable standards.'”

Mirror shield-maker Cannupa Hanska Luger: “Artists, we live on the periphery. But we are the mirrors. We are the reflective points that break through a barrier. You don’t have to be in the same economic place that I am to relate to the work that I make. That is the power of art.”

“The St. Louis museum isn’t backing off its commitment to send the painting to Washington, and the effort to stop it is a small pre-election skirmish in what will be a long, fraught and likely disorganized boycott of the Trump administration by artists, scholars, and citizens who align themselves with the arts and humanities sector. The petition, and the flurry of attention it raised, is important as a moment of what might be called the “stress testing” of this country’s cultural institutions. As Trump opponents look to the next four years, they want to know how much cultural and moral capital is stored in the institutions they love. Will museums and universities and arts centers be up to the challenge of confrontation, resistance and truth-telling?”

The phrase sort of made my head spin — is it possible Prince had just invented a whole new conceptual category of art? What could “fake art” mean? It certainly doesn’t mean “forgery,” and it can’t simply mean “bad art.” But it doesn’t seem to me simply to mean “work bought by someone the artist disapproves of” or even “work no longer condoned by the artist.” It seems — to me, anyway — to suggest something much squirrellier than that, some new way of thinking about how to navigate a news theater dominated by “fake news,” the disappearance of cultural, intellectual, and aesthetic authorities, and the rise of a disinformation state.