Category: visual

“Art was very much in the picture, because artists were hard hit by the epidemic, but also because art is (or can be) strategically useful. It can broadcast or insinuate messages into the larger culture, embody complex truths, absorb fear, preserve memory.”

Elizabeth Sackler: “This is a problem among museums because art is intrinsically a form of social activism. What would we give, [Holland Carter] asks, to have a museum that integrated its art and its history with its people and its morals? My response is that we don’t have to give a king’s ransom for that. We have that at the Brooklyn Museum.”

“For the past five years, the Barcelona-based photographer [Xavi Bou] has captured different bird species soaring around the Catalonia region to form his ongoing Ornitographies series, using a particular method he has honed to compress multiple seconds into a single frame.”

“A grant of £7.4m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), using money from national lottery players, was the final piece in a campaign to raise £10.3m to buy the work … showing an elegant and triumphant Elizabeth I after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, … from descendants of [original owner] Sir Francis Drake.”

Dede Wilsey, longtime head of the board that runs the de Young Museum and Legion of Honor in San Francisco, is giving up her top spot after the museums paid a $2 million settlement to a former high-ranking executive who said Wilsey had her ousted for revealing alleged misspending of museum money.

“In December, documentary photographer Carol Highsmith received a letter from Getty Images accusing her of copyright infringement for featuring one of her own photographs on her own website. It demanded payment of $120. This was how Highsmith came to learn that stock photo agencies Getty and Alamy had been sending similar threat letters and charging fees to users of her images, which she had donated to the Library of Congress for use by the general public at no charge.”

“We talk to Denver Art Museum curator Gwen Chanzit about her important exhibition, speak with the artist Judith Godwin – an Abstract Expressionist who has largely been ignored in the history books, I travel to the Upper West Side to get feminist art historian Linda Nochlin’s thoughts on the matter, and finally I chat with curator and critic Karen Wilkin, who was friends with Helen Frankenthaler.” (podcast)

A nymphaeum is a type of old Roman monument meant to honor nymphs, and this 16th-century version in the Villa Giulia (Julius’s palace) was moldy and monochromatic and overgrown until these anonymous Far Eastern donors came forward.

“Yesterday afternoon, artist Gary Wynans, who goes by Mr. AbiLLity, learned that [Jersey City] workers had painted over his giant painting of a Monopoly game board at the heavily trafficked Newark Avenue Pedestrian Plaza. … The surprise paint job was not the first time City Hall has made its mark on Mr. AbiLLity’s board. The entire process was riddled by authorities’ demands that the artist edit his work, foreseeing possible controversy around the original image.”

“When Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, tried to sell two paintings several years ago from its storied Alfred Stieglitz art collection, a firestorm erupted. … [But] with the debate over the future of Fisk itself swirling around her, Hazel O’Leary, then the university’s president, on behalf of the school quietly sold off two other paintings owned by Fisk.”