Category: visual

Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 “smashed records Thursday morning [at Sotheby’s] when it sold for $44.4 million – a price three times larger than the previous auction record for a female artist.”

“The chairman and chief executive of Sotheby’s is stepping down, the auction house said on Thursday, a little more than a year after the billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel S. Loeb derided the company as ‘an old master painting in desperate need of restoration’ and demanded sweeping changes.”

“The quick turnaround in the museum project’s fortunes was enough to make your head spin. It’s encouraging — and worrisome too. Certain crucial issues remain to be sorted out.”

“The Whitney Museum of American Art’s new Renzo Piano-designed building in Manhattan’s meatpacking district is to open on May 1.”

“There are other museums around the country whose objects are owned, in whole or in part, by government entities, and the DIA’s excruciating experience in defending its collection against the predations of the city’s creditors should be a wake-up call to them.”

“Counter-intuitively, university art museums are proving capable of realizing the ideals that other art museums espouse in facile mission statements polished to a gleam by publicists – primarily a ‘commitment’ to serve as cultural resources for the public and to make art education accessible.”

“In Baltimore last week, scientist-conservators told how analyzing great works with devices only physicists and chemists could love — synchrotron radiation sources, ultraviolet-induced fluorescence, high resolution, and XRF multispectrography — lifts the mysteries off some paintings and can produce stories worthy of novels.”

“A team from Harvard and the MIT Media Lab realised that light could be used to restore the appearance of the lost colours without touching the canvas. The idea was to illuminate each mural with a pattern of light that would project the missing aspects of the lost colours onto the original canvases, returning them to their original hues without disturbing the paintings’ textures.”

“How many truckloads does it take to transport a 2,800 sq. ft house, designed by one of America’s most revered Modern architects, more than 1,200 miles from New Jersey to Arkansas? Surprisingly, the answer is considerably fewer than one might think.”

“What most of us consider the front of the Music Center, along Grand Avenue, architect Welton Becket actually imagined as a secondary, less glamorous entrance. And what Becket designed as the public gateway to its plaza, along Hope Street, we think of as the back-of-house: as the spot for valet drop-offs and little more.” Christopher Hawthorne explains why – and how all this may change before too long.