Category: visual

“Artists in the US could have less than a year left to freely use drones in their work. Although current flight restrictions apply only to commercial, not artistic, use of drones, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is working on new regulations that are due to be submitted to Congress by September.”

Sotheby’s will auction Les Peupliers à Giverny on Feb. 3; it’s currently expected to fetch between $13.8 million and $18.4 million. The auction house’s catalog says the painting is being sold to “benefit the acquisitions fund.”

“Marat Guelman, the Muscovite cultural impresario and political operative who attempted to create a contemporary arts revolution in the Soviet city of Perm, is moving to Montenegro this month to open a new cultural centre. He cites the difficulty of working in Russia and the conflict in Ukraine as factors in his decision.”

“The Russian government-led clampdown on free speech, the Ukrainian conflict and the current economic downturn have prompted some members of Russia’s art world to leave the country, and many others to start weighing their options.”

The Russian art collector “is launching an ambitious campaign to connect Moscow to the international art world, and she’s tapped [the Dutch architect] to execute her vision.”

“Led by the Colombian-American artist Yazmany Arboleda, the group [Beware of Colour] wanted to draw attention to the neglect of the city’s downtown buildings. A good number of them sit empty, even while many South Africans live in shacks. … Which is why he and roughly 30 other artists marked them with about 264 gallons of hot-pink, water-soluble paint.”

“While these jewel-box museums can house extraordinary work and offer a small group of art lovers an unusual viewing experience, critics wonder whether taxpayers are helping subsidize wealthy collectors’ multimillion-dollar purchases with little public benefit in return.”

“Modernist architecture, like Modern art, has tended to be a revolt against bourgeois taste (and values): If granny, abuelita, or bubbe is for it, they’re against it. But if bourgeois taste is bad—all that chintz and those lace curtains, those cushy sofas, that flag flown from the front porch—just imagine what architects think of the working class and poor.”

At Columbia, “the collection was established in the 1750s, when King George II donated silver to what was then called King’s College. Alumni, faculty and other benefactors have added to the troves, but there have been no major campaigns to solicit, research and repair art.”

“The rhetoric surrounding these ‘rediscovered’ artists excludes too much about the specifics of their lives and the sociopolitical contexts that have perpetuated their exclusion — not simply from notoriety, but also from market success and a place in art education. Instead of acknowledging these forces, we often say women artists were too unorthodox for their times.”