Category: visual

Siyuan Zhao, a 24-year-old graduate student and a Chinese national who lives in New York, allegedly “had been following the victim, 33-year-old Shin Seo Young, and repeatedly bumped into her. When Young finally confronted her, Zhao stabbed her suddenly and repeatedly in the neck and shoulder with an X-ACTO knife.” Onlookers at first assumed it was performance art.

“Artists in those days trained for years in drawing, painting and sculpting, under exacting apprenticeship conditions, and when they did start making art in their own right, it was a deeply skilled and difficult enterprise. Works such as the Last Supper or the Sistine ceiling are among the greatest miracles of human achievement. It’s an insult to the capabilities of human beings at their most refined to casually compare this photograph with these works.”

“Museum officials had thought that the theft might have been a prank, and that the plaster study would resurface in a few days. The police hoped someone might provide information about the theft after seeing a Facebook post by the department, which included photographs and described the hand as roughly ‘the size of a 8-10 pound ham.’ The local newspaper, The Daily Journal, published an editorial pleading for the thief to come forward.”

“The trajectory of twentieth-century art history has long been a fairly tidy one, with artists of similar sensibilities herded into neat groups; those who fall beyond these bounds are too often left out of the story, sometimes ‘rehabilitated’ only decades later. But art brut offers a ready example of looking beyond expected lines of investigation into what Dubuffet praised as ‘new values not yet perceived.'”

“The moment you set eyes on them, you know that these beautiful people will die, that they are already dead and gone, and yet they live in the here and now of this moment, brief and bright as fireflies beneath the sepulchral gloom. And what keeps them here, what keeps them alive, or so the artist implies, is not just the painting but you.”

“‘If people are passing by quickly, the graphics have to be quick, strong messages,’ said Kuhn. ‘If the audience is stopped, I wanted the work to be more poetic and sublime — able to transport them away from the traffic jam and the boredom of their daily commute.'”

“Not long ago, employing advanced computer technology to deform a building into shards or blobs was enough to capture our imaginations. Today, it requires something more, be it formal sophistication, environmental innovation, intricate detailing, sophisticated materials, diverse programs, flexible layouts, or a connection to the surrounding landscape.”

“It is worth noting that the art market is really a set of loosely related mini-markets, all of which behave very differently. But for the first time in years we are seeing a similar trend across each of these distinct markets: a slowdown.”

“As the Smithsonian contemplates the dilemma yet again, it can’t be stressed strongly enough: This was a bad show from the start. It was bad on ethical grounds (because it could potentially elevate the value of an art collection owned by a close friend of the museum’s director), and it was bad on curatorial grounds.”

“Police said the gang … made up of cleaning staff and ground crew at Rome’s Fiumicino airport … devised a plan to steal the works of art by pretending to bring them to oversized baggage collection points.”