Category: visual

“People in larger cities probably have the opinion of queer people in the Midwest that they are surrounded by narrow-mindedness or having a bigger struggle. That’s true, but there are beautiful things happening in a lot of cities, like St. Louis and Kansas City — even Denver. There is a cultivation of acceptance happening. We have a lot of really positive representation within the queer communities, and it’s just starting to trickle out to the outer areas.”

“His star fell sharply after he committed an art-world taboo by bypassing conventional sales channels—selling works slowly through galleries—and auctioned off nearly $200 million of his work directly at Sotheby’s in 2008. While the sale was successful and proved his popularity, it became his undoing.”

“The earliest Beaux-Arts building in the United States, the Morgan Memorial was conceived and largely paid for by the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, a Hartford native who named it in honor of his father. In 1915, it opened to the public, 73 years after the museum itself was founded by Daniel Wadsworth. (The Wadsworth Atheneum is the oldest continuously open art museum in the country.)”

“Titled ‘Repellent Fence,’ the piece will run for four days and will consist of 28 balloons — each 10 feet in diameter — flying at a height of 75 feet at staggered points in Douglas, Ariz., and Agua Prieta, Sonora, in Mexico.”

With its slower pace of revitalisation, downtown LA may have found a unique way to remake itself.

“Some of America’s greatest museums have been made when great collectors and great architects clicked, from the Frick Collection in New York to the Menil Collection in Houston. Though it is a pleasurable place to view extraordinary art, the Broad is not in the same class.”

Of roughly two dozen galleries now in the district and its environs, half have opened in the last year, drawn in part by a glut of cheap space. A fistful came from New York or Europe, all vying for talent and clientele. And there will be more, like the blue-chip Hauser Wirth & Schimmel’s 100,000-square-foot complex coming next spring. Within a few minutes’ drive of one another, the galleries are beginning to give the area the urban cultural density that Los Angeles mostly lacks.

Places are hot one day and gone the next while others stand the test of time as they resist the developers and the demolition men. But however long the window of opportunity, the urbexers steal through it. They leave nothing but footprints, take nothing away except photographs.

According to the architects, the façade is meant to “evoke the imagery of speed and the organic curves of a coach-built automobile.” And this will no doubt attract attention from passing motorists. But we’re getting a Vegas-esque distillation of every bad architectural trend. Corrugated aluminum? Check. Steel cladding? Check. There is an old axiom in design, “If you can’t make it good, make it big. And if you can’t make it big, make it red.” The redesign seems to have taken this dictum literally.

“Salvador Salort-Pons, 45, who is the DIA’s executive director of collection strategies and information and an authority on European art, will take the post effective Oct. 15.”