If you’ve been making fun of “yarn bombing” or knitting as a cute little thing that women do, think again, buster. It’s street art. And now is its time.
Category: visual
It Can ‘Reach People Who Are Not A Captive Audience’ – Shepard Fairey On The Power Of Street Art
“If you are going to an artist’s gallery or museum show or website, you might find something interesting and new, but it’s not the same as the visceral experience of encountering something unexpected on the street.” A Q&A with correspondent Scott Timberg.
Why Are There No Female Michelangelos, Cézannes, Or Picassos? Well, There Are Now
Sarah Boxer: “There are great women artists. They are not only ‘as good as the men,’ as male critics used to say in the 1950s; some of them have altered the very terms of art, going where no man has gone before. To see what I mean, let’s walk through two starkly different all-women exhibitions.” (Oh, and by the way, “Women sculptors are funnier than men sculptors.”)
Oops! One Of Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dogs Got Smashed To Pieces At Art Basel Miami
“‘It just fell out of the display,’ said Ally Shapiro, one of the few collectors who witnessed the incident and snapped the above iPhone photo. ‘The girl standing next to it had it cleaned up in five seconds.'”
New York’s Middle Class Galleries Are Being Squeezed Out
“So where does that leave the middle class, those galleries in Chelsea and on the Lower East Side that have been around long enough to be somewhat established, but still have to sell enough to make rent? Now, they have to deal with a perfect storm of gallery-killing factors: a market cooling from top to bottom, plummeting prices for onetime hit artists who minted money for mid-tier galleries just two years ago, the chokehold of fair booth prices, skyrocketing rents in neighborhoods where buying a building is unthinkable.”
British Army To Form New Unit Of Monuments Men And Women
The looting and destruction of art, architecture, rare manuscripts, and ancient heritage by ISIS (among other evildoers) has moved the U.K. Ministry of Defence to set up a present-day version of the heroic archaeologists and art historians (don’t you love that phrase?) who saved and identified countless treasures at the end of World War II.
Van Gogh Museum In Amsterdam Doubles Down On Rejection Of That Sketchbook
A statement this week from this museum (which declared the sketches to be clumsy copies back in 2008) criticizes the experts who are caliming that the sketchbook is real van Gogh for an “excessively easygoing attitude … towards questions of authenticity.” (They’re not the only ones who think so.)
Guggenheim Helsinki Plan Killed By City Council For Second Time (At Least)
Many ordinary Helsinkians have been ambivalent at best about this project (especially the part that involves spending public money), and at this point it has been rejected, restarted, put out to competition and designed, rejected by the full city council, rejiggered and re-approved, and now rejected again. Is this the end of it, or is this a Rasputin project?
Prado’s Director To Step Down After 15 Years
In his resignation letter, Miguel Zugaza says, basically, “My work here is done,” so he’s going home to his old (and much smaller) job in Bilbao. And Spain’s leading newspaper allows as how he’s done an excellent job.
This Year’s Story On How Third-Place Auction House Phillips Is Moving Up On Sotheby’s, Christie’s
The Phillips specialists acknowledge that their November sale was only an opening move; the larger effort to disrupt the duopoly has just begun. “We’re still in this phase when we get the sympathy vote. I don’t think it’s a giant leap. It’s just a good step to take.”