Category: visual

“The banner, reading ‘Stop Labor Abuse / Countdown to Guggenheim Abu Dhabi,’ was brought into the museum hidden inside a baby stroller.” It was the first of a series of actions “carried out by the Gulf Ultra Luxury Front (G.U.L.F.) activist group.”

“In auctions that are exclusively on the web, conducted without the benefit of a live auctioneer or a live audience, prices have not come close to reaching the stratosphere; $1 million is the high bar, rarely reached.”

“Much of the work on Saadiyat Island, which is also home to a branch of the Louvre and a New York University campus, is done by foreign migrants. Critics say workers are forced to work long hours, are housed in deplorable conditions and have been subject to police raids and beatings if they object.”

“If there are no serious bumps in the road ahead, the plan would yield a streamlined, curving 410,000-square-foot new museum building designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor that would open in 2023, spanning Wilshire Boulevard with an enclosed bridge that doubles as gallery space.”

When the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt died in May, he left his 1,200-piece collection – much of which is suspected of having been looted by the Nazis and fenced by Gurlitt’s art-dealer father – to the Kunstmuseum Bern. Now WJC president Ronald Lauder has warned that if the museum accepts, “it will open a Pandora’s box and unleash an avalanche of lawsuits.”

We really don’t know, after all. We know very little about hir (or hem) at all. But we do know that Banksy is a master (mistress?) of misdirection. Kriston Capps makes the case that “she could be anyone.” (Take that, Guerilla Girls!)

That’s what the Public Service Alliance of Canada fears. “The museum’s management had previously scheduled two weeks of talks with the union for September, but canceled the negotiations the day they were due to begin … [and] then applied for conciliation, a provision that, per Canadian labor laws, would allow them to lock out the union workers beginning next month.”

“The photograph in question, titled Mother and Daughter II (2014), is a composite of four images showing the artist, Diane Ducruet, cuddling with her daughter. Both of them are nude.” A gallery removed it from a current exhibition after receiving complaints that a photo in the show’s brochure – but not actually in the show – portrays incest.

“This work, a mural that stretches 12 feet high and 22 feet long, is free to whoever can extract it from the East Village loft where it was created.”

Built in 1085, the distinctive domed mausoleum of Imam al-Daur was destroyed on October 23. According to the extremist ideology of ISIS and similar groups, veneration of any shrine is a form of idolatry.