Category: visual

“I cannot understand the University of Kentucky’s decision to hide Ann Rice O’Hanlon’s fresco in Memorial Hall. The reason given is only that it shows people doing what they actually did. Black people did work in tobacco fields. Black musicians did play for white dancers.”

“A newly published study that analyzed 484 paintings found Jesus is more likely to be portrayed with his head tilted so as to show more of his left cheek. The Buddha, on the other hand, is more frequently depicted looking straight ahead.”

“Galleries could be more flexible and open, like those in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building. Perhaps departmental names designating the galleries could be eliminated altogether.”

Attendance in the first few months is expected to top 200,000 by the end of 2015. “Were the crowds to continue at that rate indefinitely, the museum’s annual attendance would be something like 800,000. No one expects that, of course—the Broad is still benefiting from new-museum buzz.”

“What people are really getting away from is a title like ‘Treasures of . . .’ or ‘Masterpieces from . . .’” Arnold Lehman says that there was a time when “every museum had a title like that, or else it was ‘The Golden Age of . . .’ And those have gone by the boards.”

“Jeff Koons, a US pop artist whose works can fetch millions, is facing allegations he used a New York photographer’s commercial photo” – in an ad for Gordon’s Gin – “from the 1980s in a painting without permission or compensation, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.”

“The UK Intellectual Property Office … clearly acknowledges that the use of ‘specialist skills’ to improve images cannot ‘be considered as ‘original’.'”

“Historic England is launching a campaign to raise awareness of how much [postwar] art is being lost, whether metal sculptures being stolen and sold for scrap or architectural friezes being deliberately ripped down by developers.”

“At a time when the international art world could fit in a teacup and resistance to contemporary art for sale was unimaginable by today’s orgiastic standards, the works alone weren’t enough to haul in an audience. What did was her flair for the absurd and show(wo)manship in a courageous, radical effort to make art more accessible. In doing so, she creatively destroyed the nascent gallery world before it could even stand on its feet.”

“For the vast majority of European paintings before the eighteenth century, the absence of a title testified not to a deliberate refusal of prevailing custom but to the default condition of artistic practice. That these are not the works we presently designate as Untitled has more to do with reception, broadly understood, than it does with production.”