Category: visual

“Not content with having just one pavilion on its Kensington Gardens lawn this summer, [the Serpentine Gallery] has commissioned four more architects … who range in age from 36 to 93 … to design a series of summer houses to go with it.”

The gallery, “which had ruffled the feathers of the French capital’s major museums with a string of blockbuster shows on Edvard Munch, Jackson Pollock, Man Ray and the Chinese terracotta warriors of Xian, said its takings had dropped by a quarter in two years.”

“Natural chemical processes in the paint changed their colors over time, making them appear similar in the 127 years since the second was composed. ‘They’re light sensitive so it makes sense that the fading would progress from the outward in,’ Casadio said. The x-ray data helped researchers develop color maps of the paintings in their original forms, and she conceded that the maps may not be precisely what Van Gogh painted.”

“Ai Weiwei has covered the front of a Berlin landmark with 14,000 bright orange lifejackets found on the Greek island of Lesbos.”

“The shakiness comes amid tumult in stock markets around the world. Sagging oil prices, weakness in global banking sectors, and slowing economies in China and emerging markets all contributed to the markets’ volatile start to 2016.”

“In a statement to the museum, Facebook explained the painting was taken down for ‘containing excessive amounts of skin or suggestive content.’ On Friday, the museum uploaded the colorful image – which features a woman suggestively licking an ice cream cone — to its Facebook page with the following message … “

“The problem with collecting masterworks of great artists is that the act of ownership is in itself a kind of theft, stealing from the public commons of genius.”

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s International Pop exhibition starts on February 24th. To promote it, an Art Museum staffer posted the image above – Belgian artist Evelyne Axell’s 1964 painting Ice Cream – on Facebook. … Per the Art Museum, it was removed from the site for ‘containing excessive amounts of skin or suggestive content.'”

“The Grand Palais in Paris will have to close for at least two years to undergo major renovations, … raising fears about the fate of key culture events held at the site such as major exhibitions, the Monumenta contemporary art commission and Fiac Modern and contemporary art fair.”

This brought an anticlimactic end to a trial in Federal District Court in Lower Manhattan that has lasted nearly three weeks and included dramatic testimony from a string of art experts, former Knoedler employees, and the De Soles themselves.