Category: visual

“Most rationales for public art programs emphasize civic-minded virtue. On this view, public art — fiber in the salty diet of the polis — is considered an inherent good for the citizenry, believed to promote a robust sense of community and place.”

“What we found is very understated compared to today’s graffiti. We’re used to thinking of it as in spray paint, really colorful. What we found was the underside of a bridge with completely undisturbed writing from 1914 to 1921 and it was the graffiti of hobos written in things like charcoal from their fires or chalk.”

“Which images from our age will endure? Will they be Turner prize-winning artworks, or will they be pictures such as those taken by the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite, which launched in 2009 and over the next four years collected the first light in the universe?”

“For most of her life, Gilot has been waiting for the world to catch up with her. She has always pointed out that it does her a great disservice as an artist to identify her as ‘Picasso’s lover’ or ‘a friend of Matisse’.”

“In recent months, much of the conversation over the work has focused not on the particulars of its provenance but on whether Mr. Nahmad went to great lengths to conceal his ownership.”

“The current landscape of contemporary figurative painting is particularly strong, not only due to the commercial market for it, but perhaps more so the way that artists are portraying people in response to salient topics and issues of the 21st century—from race, gender, and war, to privacy, social media, and love.”

“For 30 years, Bulgarian-born artist Christo has wanted to build a monumental ‘Mastaba’ – a type of ancient Egyptian tomb – out of oil barrels in the desert of Abu Dhabi. His project has just materialised on a smaller yet still impressive scale: nine meters high, 17 meters long and nine meters wide, the work is on display at the Fondation Maeght, a museum of modern art in the south of France.”

“Rome will have what city officials are calling its first ‘archaeological station’ after a construction team recently uncovered 2nd-century CE Roman barracks during ongoing work on the city’s third metro line.”

Closed for the past four years due to ongoing renovations, the Musée Girodet was set to reopen next year but will have to push back that date due to the flood, which Montargis Mayor Jean-Pierre Door described as a “cultural catastrophe.” The museum’s building sits at the center of a narrow strip of land bordered by the Loing river and a canal, but during the renovations most of its collection has been stored off-site, even closer to the water, in the underground vault of a former bank.