Category: visual

When vandals knocked off the head of the young Christ in a Madonna-and-child statue at a parish in Sudbury, Ontario, the priest accepted the offer of a local artist to sculpt a replacement. Uh-oh: our correspondent describes the result as “Lisa Simpson crossed with King Triton.” Where have we seen this story before?

The original 11 paintings still hang on the walls of the agency’s headquarters, “represent[ing] an elemental approach to art [and] a swashbuckling donor,” according to a brief blurb on the agency’s website. What these paintings represent about the CIA’s relationship to the art world, though, is more complicated. On these walls, the intersection between US art and politics is especially busy.

“The Museo dell’Opera del Duomo [in Florence] presented two little-known 15th-century terra-cotta sculptures on Thursday as the possible work of Donatello and Verrocchio (with, perhaps, the help of Verrocchio’s erstwhile assistant Leonardo da Vinci), proposed attributions that are expected to stir debate in Renaissance art scholarship.”

“Known for her collaborations with biologists and pungent Petri dish works, [Anicka] Yi exhibits smell as sculpture. ‘It isn’t unusual to smell a work by Yi before seeing it stewing in a corner or leaking down a wall,’ Beau Rutland wrote in the January 2013 issue of Artforum. ‘Scent becomes an interception, a piling-up of unexpected triggers, awakening sensations often ignored in aesthetic spaces.'”

“Volunteers on the annual excavations at Vindolanda Roman fort in Northumberland have unearthed an astonishing 421 shoes from a ditch. And one of the shoes is strikingly similar to the Adidas Predator football boot.”

The “museumization of migration,” as one academic has put it, is a significant shift in the history of museums. But the resulting exhibitions deserve as much attention for how they obscure the West’s new relationship to migrants as for how they clarify it.

Two months after guerrilla artists put up nude statues of Donald Trump in five US cities, “the grotesque caricature of the Democratic candidate appeared outside the Bowling Green station during morning rush hour on Tuesday [showing] Clinton with hoofed feet and a Wall Street banker resting his head on her bare breasts. The statue was up for less than three hours before an enraged woman toppled it over and started yelling at the statue’s creator.” (includes video)

The installation, titled Sky Landing, is in Jackson Park, which will also be the site of the Obama Presidential Library. “[It] consists of 12 steel lotus petals and mounds that form the yin yang symbol to symbolize peace.”

“The warning labels on art supplies do not display a skull and crossbones, but alerts about carcinogens and diseases frighten artists, leading art supply stores and paint manufacturers to discontinue certain products and stock the alternative hues.”

“Creative Scotland’s study found that almost half of Scotland’s artists were having to take on additional jobs to make ends. Self-employed artists are said to be earning an average of less than £15,000 a year, compared to the average Scottish salary of £26,000, with even those work more than 15 years experience behind them struggling on little more than £20,000 a year on average.”