Category: visual

“The Brooklyn Museum is offering voluntary buyouts to address a budget deficit of about $3 million, the museum’s director, Anne Pasternak, informed the staff on Wednesday. ‘It’s a course correction,’ Ms. Pasternak said in a telephone interview.”

“Ten full-time faculty members who came to George Washington University when it took control of the Corcoran school were told Monday that their one-year contracts would not be renewed. … The cuts come as enrollment dropped 24 percent since the university assumed control of the school in August of 2014.”

“In a moment of exquisite justice, you can peer straight into the living rooms of Neo Bankside from the top of the Switch House – and observe the bleak still lifes of mail-order luxury, as sterile as a stack of Damien Hirst’s tanks. Having accidentally spawned this exclusive enclave, it’s as if the Tate has now co-opted it as a site-specific installation.”

“Steel is a dying industry, and mining it can be hazardous for the environment, but discussing the carbon footprint of Mr. Serra’s project is beside the point. The important question, in terms of his legacy, is whether new versions of this work have relevance.”

“The commonly accepted reading of Johns’s career – that he rejected subjectivity, which we associate with Abstract Expressionism, in favor of detached objectivity – overlooks his interest in intuitive responses to life and art.” (This is Part One; read Part Two here.)

“The closing of 38 Greene feels like the end of an era, partly because it reflects the threat posed by the gold-coasting of Manhattan to its alternative spaces — among them the excellent White Columns on West 13th Street. Now facing the ends of leases, profit-hungry landlords and the like, these spaces are seers. They have a nerve and flexibility absent from museums and commercial galleries. Their nurturing of non-mainstream artists and collectives is essential to a living art world.”

“There are already more than 6m objects in the Museum of London, the largest urban history collection in the world, but its director, Sharon Ament, is acquiring a few more: a row of derelict shops, several tonnes of salt, a giant Edwardian gas burner, an entire street, and a working train line.”

“The collection was originally built according to a dominant art history which we are very familiar with, but the real story is a much bigger one, because that dominant story left out a lot of places and a lot of practices and a lot of women artists. We haven’t rewritten the history but we are asking questions about the history and plotting co-ordinates. It’s a bigger story.”

“The offending works are the pop-surrealist artist [Mark Rylan]’s ‘Fountain’ (2003) and ‘Rosie’s Tea Party’ (2005), which both show young, doll-like girls in unsettling scenes: In the former, a figure cradles her own head as blood springs from her neck; in the latter, a girl is surrounded by an assortment of meats and slicing a hunk of ham inscribed with the papal encyclical ‘Mystici corporis Christi.'”

“They were among some 2 million works that Russian soldiers took as ‘reparations,’ from Germany near the end of the war. Following two fires at the Bode, where the works were ironically stowed for their own protection, Germany presumed many of the works were destroyed.”