Category: visual

“Leonard A. Lauder, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s chairman emeritus, initially opposed the museum’s move downtown to its new home in the Meatpacking district from the Breuer building on Madison Avenue. Now, that new home will bear his name.”

“The Nazis were superb record keepers. But not good enough to help me settle whether this work came out of Europe via theft or honest transaction. Instead, it has joined the growing ranks of paintings in provenance limbo.”

“A Louisiana House bill that seeks to limit public funds spent on art for state buildings is getting a lot of attention, but would be unlikely save Louisiana much money for priorities like education and health care.”

“Art has become an instrument for generating wealth and political influence in the interests of an audacious plutocracy. In this sense, we are indeed being ruled by art in a way we have not been before, and its price now comes at a direct social cost. Its commodification has ceased to be a matter merely of cultural debate, as it was for Fry, and should now be subject to political scrutiny in the name of the public interest.”

“The painting, which is being billed as ‘The Next Rembrandt,’ was created using data from more than 168,000 fragments of Rembrandt’s work. Over the course of 18 months, a group of engineers, Rembrandt experts and data scientists analyzed 346 of Rembrandt’s works, then trained a deep learning engine to ‘paint’ in the master’s signature style.” (includes video)

“Professors of my ilk see painting as a hands-on art form best learned through looking at great paintings and at painters in action, and by painting while being coached. The new pedagogy see[s] painting as best learned through critical thinking, a method borrowed from literature and the social sciences.” Laurie Fendrich explains why the latter is a dangerous approach.

“There are countless blogs devoted to poking fun at paintings and sculptures that otherwise would have been forgotten: The Ugly Renaissance Babies Tumblr is an addicting compendium of paintings featuring babies that look like old men, worms, creepy dolls, and Gollum. Other blogs like All This Shitty Art and The Weirdest, Worst Art pay homage to the myriad amateur artists publishing their work on the Internet (to Tumblr users’ amusement and dismay).”

No news value here, just fun pictures that make you look at these Greek and Roman statues in a different way.

“The Valsuani foundry, whose bronze sculptures by Edgar Degas have roiled the art market for more than a decade, is closing, by order of a French judge … Degas sculpted in wax and clay but only as an intellectual exercise. He hated the idea of casting his sculptures in bronze.”

“The BBC and the writer parted acrimoniously in 1943, when Orwell resigned after two wartime years as a talks producer in the Eastern Service, making propaganda broadcasts for India. In his resignation letter, under his real name, Eric Blair, he wrote: ‘For some time past I have been conscious that I was wasting my own time and the public money on doing work that produces no result.'”