Category: visual

“In 2016, the art market received what it had purportedly wished for – some of the speculative froth came off the top of the market, easing fears that a bubble would burst and hurt the industry. But it also received much of what it probably did not forecast or desire: a 30% drop in overall market volume, a series of high-profile disputes, court actions and authenticity issues that resulted in substantial payouts, and a fall-off in attendance at some art fairs that read to some as cultural cooling-off at the bling end of the contemporary art business.”

“Over the past year, a number of African Americans have accepted prestigious appointments at important art and cultural institutions across the country. These curators and cultural leaders to watch are in positions to drive exhibition programming, acquisitions, innovations in what is considered art, influence hiring, fellowship and internship opportunities, and how institutions grow their audiences.”

His middle finger in particular. Kapoor strikes back on Instagram at the artist who dissed him with the pinkest-pink ban.

“With such astonishing sums of money being tossed around, one might assume that art buyers are making cool, levelheaded decisions, especially when they’re in a room full of people they know and are trying to impress. This is often not the case. To the contrary, scientists see mounting evidence of ‘auction psychology’.” Here’s how it works.

And only one of them was in D.C. Other major museum/gallery towns are well-represented, though, as are two pretty out-of-the-way spots.

“Sandwiching layers of wood and adhesive,yields cross-laminated timber (CLT), a kind of super-plywood that comes in immense slabs as long as a bowling lane and as thick as 12 inches. A similar process yields steel-hard beams called glulam. The principle is almost touchingly simple: ‘Gluing a stack of cards together produces something stronger than building a house of cards.'” And you can build skyscrapers with it.

Indra Kumar Jha makes his living taking pictures of the funeral rites at the burning ghats on the Ganges River in Varanasi.

Garry Wills looks at the spectacular detail and the particular idiosyncracies of the collection of figurines at the Chicago Art Institute.

You can blame the threat of lawsuits for just about all of the problems, including a contraction in the value of Old Masters. And without real experts, “There will be an even greater consolidation and reliance on a small number of powerful artist foundations and committees, who have the money to deter or fight litigation.”

The process involved in getting an emoji through the Unicode approval process is long and vast – and now brands are getting in on the act, including Taco Bell’s influencing the 2015 addition of (you guessed it) a taco emoji.