“Google plans to send its 20-strong camera convoy to museums around the world … which means that Google is increasingly receiving and compiling a ton of data for free (it doesn’t pay the museums) – so we were curious: what are the benefits museums receive by showcasing their collections on another platform?”
Category: visual
How Van Dyck Created Modern Portraiture
“Van Dyck focused on the subject’s attitude toward being in the picture, a joint venture of artist and sitter that continues to this day as a model, or a foil, for artists like Kehinde Wiley, Elizabeth Peyton, and Cindy Sherman. We might include earlier practitioners as well, like Lucien Freud and Alice Neel, or, to cast a wider net, photographers Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, and Richard Avedon.”
Could Virtual Reality Transform How Architects Work The Way CAD Did?
“New virtual reality tools will allow architects and designers to create buildings and products intuitively in 3D space around them, according to the director of visualisation studio VRtisan. The technology, which couples VR software created for game designers with hand-held motion controllers, offers designers ‘a completely new tool.'”
Rowdy Children Smash Glass Sculpture In Museum As Parents Capture It All On Video
“Just when you’d thought you’d seen it all when it comes to art-breaking mishaps (selfie seekers, I’m looking at you), along comes this incredible footage from China of two boys fracturing a sculpture in the Shanghai Museum of Glass.”
An Ideally Kafkaesque Statue Of Kafka
David Černy’s K. “stands ten meters high, and renders the author’s arresting chiseled face … in a constantly-morphing assemblage of metal. His face is both perennially staring over the plaza … and yet never static or fully graspable. This is only exactly like the omnipresent but inscrutable Court that presides over Josef K. in The Trial, knowing exactly where he is and what he’s doing; present in everyone around him from clueless petty officials to teenage prostitutes, and yet unable or unwilling to present him with a formal charge.”
Why The Search To Recover Nazi-Looted Art Is Still Active
“It’s a question of justice. And it’s becoming increasingly important as we get further and further away from World War II, because the original owners are dying, and even knowledge about collections is disappearing with each subsequent generation.”
SFMoMA’s Trophy Art – So Where’s The History?
“Why are so many works by single artists — male artists who enjoy art-superstar reputations — hung as if animating visual encyclopedia entries, occupying one gallery upon the next upon the next? And whose idea was it to do it this way? For the influential donors of the new SFMOMA, political art appears never to have been invented.”
Qatari Royal Family And Gagosian Client Settle Lawsuit Over That Picasso Bust Of Marie-Thérèse
“A settlement was reached in an international legal drama over Picasso’s plaster Bust of a Woman pitting two of the world’s biggest art buyers against each other, New York billionaire Leon Black versus a member of Qatar’s royal family. But who now owns the 1931 sculpture, depicting the artist’s then-mistress and muse, Marie-Therese Walter, remains a secret.”
Acid-Damaged Renaissance Painting Restored After 10 Years Of Work
“The Adoration of the Shepherds by 16th-century Italian artist Sebastiano del Piombo was removed from a wooden panel with acid in the 1700s and then painted over. Conservators at Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum worked to repair the damage.”
Menil Collection In Houston Selects Met Curator As Its Next Director
Houston native Rebecca Rabinow, currently curator-in-charge of the [Met Museum’s] new Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art, takes up her new position in July.