Category: visual

“South London artist Gram Hilleard has created a series of postcards showing the city as he sees it: grey skies, soulless skyscrapers and boarded-up shops.”

“Like an ageing rock star, it’s on tour, put to work to raise money. The first performance was at the Frick Collection in New York. It’s now on display at the de Young Museum in San Francisco until May, when it will travel to the Kimbell Art Museum. Texas will hang the Botticelli after all. Visitors in Edinburgh will come face to face with a blank space on the wall.”

“Art and science, we feel, should have something to say to each other. But perhaps they speak different languages after all. I don’t speak the language of science too well, either, but I do know one thing: it is concerned with the wonder of nature. There is a depressing lack of wonder in this technically sophisticated but intellectually and emotionally empty art.”

“It will be announced in Germany on Friday afternoon that Dercon, who is Belgian, has been lured to take over from Frank Castorf in 2017, another coup for the country’s culture ministry which also persuaded the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor to move the city to take charge of the committee overseeing the new Humboldt-Forum cultural centre.”

“Outrage had been growing within Kenya’s artistic community ever since it was announced that only one Kenyan had been selected to represent the country at this year’s international exhibition, along with six Chinese artists (none of whom live or work in Kenya) and one Italian artist.”

“At last month’s hearing, university representatives sought to limit the designation, saying they need flexibility to use the space for educational purposes. But in its nomination, the nonprofit DC Preservation League requested that historic status extend to most of the building, including the auditorium and basement studio space.”

James Meyer “worked as an assistant to Johns for 25 years, and stole the works over the course of a six-year period, from 2006 to 2012. He admitted to stealing 22 works from Johns, all of which were unfinished pieces that the artist had not authorized for sale. Meyer sold them for a total of $6.5 million, and pocketed half of the proceeds.” (And now that he’s being sentences, he’s very, very sorry.)

“The best recent innovations have been gathered in a new report, Next Practices in Digital and Technology, that the Association of Art Museum Directors is set to release on Friday. The report describes 41 museum projects that use digital technology to engage visitors, make collections more accessible and understandable or improve museum operations like ticketing and collections management.”

“There is, of course, one great difference between earlier artistic impressions of the end of civilisation and these contemporary cataclysms. Today, the end of the world as we know is not a romantic fantasy, but a potential reality. Overwhelming scientific evidence minutely charts human-caused climate change. Sombre analyses carefully map the likely consequences of melting ice caps and rising sea levels on a precise timeline. We can’t look at these surreal images as playful acts of imagination; they are reasonable predictions.”

His first major work to be realized since The Gates in 2005 – and the first since the death of his wife and partner, Jeanne-Claude – The Floating Piers will be “three kilometres of shimmering yellow walkways on Lake Iseo in Italy that will link two of its islands to the mainland for the first time.”