Category: visual

Well, we think it’s gross, anyway. It’s about a certain material he liked to use …

“Park West was founded in 1969, is based outside Detroit, and boasts it’s the world’s biggest art gallery. It sells pictures and sculptures at thousands of live auctions held on more than 100 ships each year. Norwegian, Royal Caribbean, and Carnival all host Park West. And they all get a cut of the revenue. Park West has had annual sales as high as $400 million and counted more than 2 million customers. With those big numbers come bitter complaints.”

“In this first phase of restoration on one of the earliest art works to use oil paints on a large scale, new scanning techniques uncovered the singular skills of the Flemish brothers Jan and Hubert Van Eyck, beneath layers of overpainting and varnish.”

Chuck Close, Sarah Sze, Vik Muniz and Jean Shin each got a station “to treat … as their very own and make them into individual installations” as part of what the Times calls “one of the most ambitious contemporary art projects that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority has ever undertaken.”

“The postmillennial comeback of Brutalism is not surprising, given today’s worldwide vogue for strenuously exhibitionistic architecture enabled by computer design, which has resulted in grotesque behemoths far stranger than anything achievable through the relatively low-tech means of concrete construction. Some older observers will see this fascination with grandiosity and ugliness as the return of the repressed, a reminder of why Brutalism fell into disfavor and disrepute in the first place.”

“The mind-bending point that Eric Kandel makes is that abstract art, which strips away the narrative, the real-life, expected visuals, requires active problem-solving. We instinctively search for patterns, recognizable shapes, formal figures within the abstraction. We want to impose a rational explanation onto the work, and abstract and minimalist art resists this. It makes our brains work in a different, harder, way at a subconscious level. Though we don’t articulate it as such, perhaps that is why people find abstract art more intimidating, and are hastier to dismiss it. It requires their brains to function in a different, less comfortable, more puzzled way. More puzzled even than when looking at a formal, puzzle painting.”

The Architect’s Newspaper chooses the best new buildings of the year. Jurors’ judgments were based “on evidence of innovation, creative use of new technology, sustainability, strength of presentation, and, most importantly, great design.”

A new approach to (some very) old art aims to entrance the contemporary museum visitor, not to mention art auction buyer. Why? “Historic pictures were for centuries the market’s biggest earners, but over the last 10 years or so they have been progressively overshadowed by postwar and contemporary art.”

Basically, she’s not into the hot market: “Ms. Goodman said disdainfully: ‘There are people who buy and sell art as if it were shares in ranches or something that like.’ And one of her most important jobs now, she said, is ‘to keep the work out of auction so that it’s dealt with by responsible people and by museums.'”

Artist Rob Pruitt has painted one piece for every day of the Obama presidency. “Pruitt treated the Obama Paintings as a an exercise in repetition, like a catechism or yoga practice. Most mornings, with rare exceptions, he’ll wake and make a new one.”