Category: visual

“What were hard and fast boundaries between commercial galleries and museums a decade ago no longer exist. Top galleries eager to woo blue-chip artists, collectors and a more diverse public are increasingly turning to big-name museum professionals to mount exhibitions of depth that would look at home at the Met or the Museum of Modern Art. But in some cases that scholarship may be in the service of business.”

Grimshaw Architects’ means of directing light deep into the bowels of the huge transport interchange is the first of its kind: a six-storey funnel lined with a suspended mesh of 952 precisely positioned, diamond-shaped aluminium reflectors – and it is about to show off its star feature in the brightest of ways.

“If this act of vandalism means anything, it speaks more to a certain intolerance in France than to art itself,” Kapoor said in an interview with Le Figaro on Thursday. “The problem seems more political than anything else.”

“London, in particular, is in the throes of a heritage war. This is partly because the city is at the sharp end of the development wedge. There simply isn’t enough space for all the luxury apartments, skyscrapers with huge trading floors and “public” lookout points that you have to pay to access. Small buildings that no one really notices, but are hugely important to London’s character, are often first in the line of fire. So are the big ones.”

“A huge fire has destroyed part of the 19th Century basilica of Saint-Donatien in the French city of Nantes. The blaze broke out on Monday after morning Mass, with worshippers evacuated from the building.”

“According to Le Figaro, staff at Versailles is still trying to identify the vandals from security camera footage, and the palace’s director Catherine Pégard plans to lodge a formal complaint. The artist, meanwhile, sees the attack on his work as symptomatic of a particularly regressive tendency in French society.”

“The J. Paul Getty Museum has just acquired an important early sculpture by the Baroque master Bernini: a marble bust of Pope Paul V that many art historians did not believe still existed.”

Paul Durand-Ruel was the gallery owner who shepherded Renoir, Monet, Pissarro, Manet, Morisot and their peers past the haughty skepticism of the Paris art establishment – and their works into the hands of U.S. collectors. “Do not think the Americans are savages,” he once wrote. “On the contrary, they are less ignorant, less close-minded than our French collectors.”

“It seems to me, from a photographic point of view, that the public space has become privatised, with CCTV everywhere and the lone photographer increasingly unwelcome.”

“With the clearance of both [Afghanistan’s] government and UNESCO, the temporary revival was the most recent consideration of how to honor the memory of the statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001, while respecting the gaping void left by their demolition.”