Category: visual

“There seems to be no end to the creativity the Bible engenders – which makes it a crying shame the Museum of Biblical Art has to close, and a tragedy if we cannot acknowledge one of the great sources of modern culture.”

“I was actually happy that nobody challenged us on doing Björk – that artists like her, who cross disciplines, have a place in a museum like ours … We just didn’t do the show we should have done. Fair enough. We just need to find a way to do those shows better.”

“The small, secular museum, which is dedicated to exploring the Bible’s influence on Western art, is a casualty of Manhattan’s astronomical rents. For the past decade, the museum had been renting space inside the American Bible Society (ABS) building near Lincoln Center for $1 a year. In February, ARS announced it had sold the building and planned to move to Philadelphia.”

“America is a big country. Naturally, vast swaths of its often marvelous art history have always been missing in action in New York.”

Some of the country’s most important – and beloved – buildings sustained terrible damage (and a few were relatively lucky under the circumstances). Here are some of the badly-affected sites, with before and after photos.

The trickster artist and Chinese dissident is actually imprisoned in his house in Beijing – so who better for a show at the island prison? “To a site often flattened into a caricature as the onetime home of mobster Al Capone, Ai has layered on a contemporary meditation on political imprisonment, freedom of speech and the power of creativity as a force that can better society.”

Though it used to end the immigration story in 1954, “the museum will leap more than 60 years forward with the opening of two new galleries in what had once been the station’s kitchen and laundry. They pick up the narrative where it was left off.”

“The girl continues, step by step,
the critic girl, girl critic
listening to the audio guide, with its stories that are free, so free —
free of context, free of facts, free even of the lava girl’s name,
a lava girl, in the shadow of 50, still being described as a ‘girl.'”

“The first few times the Chinese contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang tried to make gunpowder drawings, his art caught on fire—literally. His early method involved hanging blank canvases and oil paintings on the wall and throwing rocket fireworks at them.”

Once a week, during a show that attracts about 13,000 people a day, “the museum sells tickets to a late-night showing of the exhibit. A maximum of 1,100 guests are allowed into the vast museum to wander freely through uncrowded galleries for the evening.’