Category: visual

“The new Whitney forces a decisive yet organic realignment of the balance of power among New York’s main museums that is good for all concerned. With its enlarged galleries and the reveal of its collection, the Whitney, and to some extent American art, should begin getting the full respect both deserve.”

“Between the quality of the art and the intellectual ambition of the programming and commissions, it was clear that the fair was going to cause a seismic shift across the art world.”

The elusive British street artist “slipped in and out of Gaza in February, leaving his mark on three slabs of rubble left from Israel’s 50-day fight with Hamas, the Islamic group that controls Gaza.”

The personal history behind the images may be (as so often with Frida) yet more complicated.

“Though the war is still raging, the government has already established a Ministry of Reconstruction in Damascus that has allegedly begun selling property. It has also burned land registry offices and deleted title entries, presumably to keep people from reclaiming their houses and businesses after the war ends (more than half of Syria’s citizens have fled the country).”

“The relationship between Tate Britain and Modern, then, is really about what importance we give to old art and the concept of a national culture; and as it turns out, most people are more interested these days in the concept of internationalism and the culture of the contemporary, than what appears to be the stuffy, out-of-date world of narrow-minded nationalism; which is why almost 5.8 million visitors flocked to Tate Modern in 2014, and barely a quarter of that number made it to Tate Britain.”

An angry Christopher Knight: “Being misquoted is one thing, but being completely misrepresented in an art museum wall text is quite another – especially when something I wrote more than 20 years ago is used as a slur concocted from the direct opposite of my critical opinion.”

“Over thirty-five years, from around 1794, when Goya, still in Madrid, was recovering from the devastating illness that left him permanently deaf and forced him to abandon grand court painting, to his death in Bordeaux in 1828, aged 82, he put together a sequence of eight ‘albums’ of brush and ink drawings. Often he added a laconic, ironic caption in black chalk.”

“In many places, the detritus of centuries-old temples and palaces has been left unguarded, diminishing chances to eventually rebuild one of the world’s largest clusters of cultural heritage sites.”

“Our roster of collectors features those who have been most active within the past 12 months and have shown a remarkable commitment to collecting.”