Category: visual

In the Art Nouveau map from 1928, for instance, artist Mélanie Elisabeth Leonard painted a purple pterodactyl peering down at a city that’s filled with the type of people mentioned in a poem about arrogant Ubermenches.

There will be a “hybrid lounge-workshop-performance space inside the museum called the Commons, which is being designed by the Mexico City design team Pedro y Juana, with custom furniture that can be flattened and hung on the walls when not in use. The space will also feature plant-shaped lamps, some with actual greenery, hanging from the ceiling. This gathering space will be free to the public, whether or not they pay the $12 suggested admission fee to see exhibitions. “Audiences today want a space where they can come together and interact. We are finding that people are really hungry for civil and civic dialogue — now more than ever.”

“As Cage demonstrated in 4’33”, a piece for piano inspired in part by the White Paintings in which nothing is played for that exact duration, there is no silence in music that is not also an opening to sound of other sorts, and so it is with these monochromes: the visual realm is opened up even as it appears to be evacuated. The Black Paintings also point to a space outside painting, which Rauschenberg called the ‘gap between art and life’, and it was capacious enough to contain the Elemental Sculptures as well as the Combines – combinations of painting, collage and sculpture – to come.”

“The man who led the facsimile project, a proudly dishevelled Englishman named Adam Lowe, was admiring the fake walls alongside me. Lowe prefers to call them “rematerialized” walls. He whispered, “Amazing—it looks just like the real thing, doesn’t it?” He is fifty-seven years old, and looks like what Paul McCartney might look like had McCartney never undergone restoration.”

“Values can be inflated when auction houses offer competitive guarantees to secure major consignments. These guarantee can then be transferred to a third party, who will either buy a work at a sale, or be rewarded for their unsuccessful bidding. More recently, some third-party guarantors — called “irrevocable bidders” at Sotheby’s — have also been paid fees if they are the purchaser. These confidential arrangements, denoted by symbols in the catalog, can have the effect of deterring bidding in the salesroom.”

“What is it about a specific piece of art that makes it become seen as an esteemed creation, while something entirely similar can be viewed as nothing more than (quite literally) a vessel for disposing of human excrement? This was the brazen question that researchers at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Leuven in Belgium recently tackled using the scientific method. They published their results in the journal Human Nature in October.”

“What if the art world was a lot more integrated into the world world? What if the art world and the world world existed in a state of mutual accountability to one another? What if art was valued as a shared cultural transmission that brings people together despite difference, instead of as a luxury good that promotes class division?”

Factum Arte won fame for installing a faithful copy of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana where Napoleon had ripped the original from the wall. Its full-size copy of the teenage pharaoh’s burial chamber has been installed at Luxor so that tourists can spend time in it without their breath and body moisture damaging the original. Now there’s a hope that Factum could help recreate at least some of what ISIS destroyed at Nimrud.

The window, to be unveiled in June 2018 in the church’s north transept, is in honor of Queen Elizabeth II.