Category: visual

“Picture this. Visitors to the Vatican arrive in St Peter’s Square … After looking at a display on Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes, they are filtered into a full-scale replica, with a ceiling that is a giant photograph of the famous artwork. Perhaps one day this may come about, as the Vatican worries about preserving its artistic treasures. But I suspect no one would be very happy to visit a substitute Sistine Chapel. What would be the point? … Why then is it considered perfectly reasonable to offer fake ice age art as a cultural attraction?”

“Ending an often testy and sometimes distant 25-year coexistence, the Barnes Foundation will merge with the foundation established by the estate of Violette de Mazia, Albert C. Barnes’ longtime colleague.”

“The minute that these events in Iraq started, voices came about again saying that we should open up acquisition policies of museums, making it easier to purchase artifacts, just to get them out of the area of conflict. But what these people do not discuss is that these artifacts that you can buy on the market now … they have been looted.”

The 4-foot-high, 100-pound, fiberglass-reinforced cement bust of Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia after divulging secret U.S. government collection of phone records, turned up on a monument that honors American captives who died on British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. The three artists say they considered the bust “a gift to the city” that could spur discussion about American ideals, values and heroes. Parks officials and police didn’t see it that way.

So, Luminato approached a wide range of African-Canadian artists, scholars and community leaders to attend a meeting to simply discuss the idea of bringing the show to Toronto. The reaction, especially on social media, was so immediately condemning, with one activist reaching out to the organizer of the British boycott for advice, that Luminato quickly backed away from the idea. The group is still meeting on April 22 to discuss Exhibit B, but it will be a rather hypothetical discussion: On Tuesday, the festival announced that it “has determined that 2016 is not the right time to present Exhibit B in Toronto.”

Not that it’s shutting down, mind you: it’s simply leaving its longtime venue at the seaside city’s Bergamot Station. “The museum, which typically spends about $2 million a year, has the flexibility to consider a variety of new locations because it has no art collection tethering it to a permanent spot that is specially equipped to store and preserve art.”

“How blue is the visual art of our era? Interpreting the data of 94,526 paintings created between 1800 CE and 2000 CE, Martin Bellander, a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, discovered that blue has increased in art while orange has become less common.”

“Unfortunately, their wild popularity means these accounts have no reason to change. Yet that very popularity also shows that people are curious about historic images.”

“Being the director of Eli Broad’s new museum might strike some people as a contradiction in terms. … How could someone running Mr. Broad’s private museum really have any power?” Joanne Heyler, however, is just the person to pull it off.

Hokusai “is, after all, not only one of the great figures of Japanese art, but a father figure of much of Western modernism. Without Hokusai, there might have been no Impressionism – and the global art world we today take for granted might look very different indeed.”