Category: visual

“The Bronx Museum of the Arts, whose attendance has quadrupled since it instituted free admission in 2012, announced Wednesday that it had started a $25 million capital campaign to renovate and expand its building along the Grand Concourse and to establish an endowment for the first time.”

One reason why the city is so hard-up (beyond the still-towering effects of the 2008 financial crisis) is that its administration is almost as dilapidated as the monuments of which it is custodian. Steered by a mix of sclerotic incompetence and outright corruption, the city’s mismanagement has long earned it the sobriquet “Mafia Capital.”

“Rome on Tuesday issued a 500-million-euro SOS to companies, wealthy philanthropists and its own citizens to help restore many of the Italian capital’s iconic historic sites and avoid the risk of some falling into ruin. … Saddled with debts of some 12 billion euros ($13 billion), Rome cannot afford to do it on its own.”

“Students in Indiana University’s new Ph.D program in virtual heritage, along with Italian colleagues here in Florence, will photograph the museum’s collection of ancient Greek and Roman statuary, a total of about 1,250 pieces, between the Uffizi itself and the Pitti Palace and Boboli gardens on the other side of the Arno River.”

“When one of the oldest and most respected art galleries in America, the Knoedler Gallery in New York, closed its doors abruptly in 2011, the art world was stunned. Not because the gallery closed, but by the discovery that over the course of 15 years, the gallery and its president, Ann Freedman, had sold millions of dollars in forgeries to wealthy collectors.”

“JR, best known for mounting women’s portraits onto building facades in a Brazilian favela and his Inside Out global art project, had a specific idea in mind: to combat the selfie ‘phenomenon’ of tourists snapping themselves in front of the Louvre without really observing its architecture.”

“If ‘humanitarian architecture’ sometimes turns out not to be humanitarian, it is not always architecture either. In the urge to do good, or to be seen to do good, architects can forget their skills of making spaces and buildings that are desirable to inhabit.”

“The paintings were stolen last July, along with other valuables belonging to the owner, who is reported to have been a close friend of Bacon. The works, which comprise portraits and landscapes, are yet to be recovered.”

“There are moments when your thoughts slide elsewhere. Then you have existential thoughts. If I’m not concentrating on me, will I look less like me? It does make you think about what you represent in a way that you never do if you’re having a photograph taken.”

“This is what genius looks like now. We live at a moment when the difference between art and not-art is so small and subtle that where you put something can change it from stuff to concept, thing to idea, a £20 pair of glasses to a million-dollar artistic masterpiece.”