Category: visual

“Newly published figures showed that Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs received 562,622 visitors, surpassing the Matisse Picasso exhibition of 2002, the previous record holder at 467,166, and the Damien Hirst exhibition of 2012, with 463,087.” (The show opens at MoMA in New York next month.)

“The project faces a major crossroad this week over its controversial Frank Gehry design, which uses woven steel tapestries strung on 80-foot columns to depict the modest Kansas roots of the decorated soldier and statesman. The Eisenhower Memorial Commission on Wednesday will review two approaches, including one that removes most of these elements. If that plan is selected, Gehry informed the commission, he will ask for his name to removed.”

The artists Elmgreen & Dragset, who built the installation in 2005 on a highway about 40 miles from the art town of Marfa, Texas, “wanted the mock-up store, the size of shack but with Prada shoes and bags inside, to be a critique of the luxury goods industry. But it was threatened when it was deemed an illegal roadside advertisement.”

“Some critics complain that Google’s initiative to take us on virtual trips through museums and to show us great pieces of art on demand, as we sit gazing at our laptops, will discourage people from actually going to these institutions. This is flatly untrue. Museum attendance is on the rise, dramatically so.”

Not the raw meat dish, silly; she means the painter. “I am no connoisseur, cultural scholar, or art historian. I know nothing about painterly techniques, chromatic gradations, or artistic affinities, and my infatuation with him is largely affectionate fancy. I feel I know him personally, and I often sense that I am directly in touch with him across the centuries, across the continents, as one might be in touch with a living friend. But however much I delight in Carpaccio’s virtual company, I know hardly anything about the man, and in this I am not alone.”

“Adrenaline junkies, adventure enthusiasts, and radical architecture lovers: we have a house for you.”

“In six months, the public cost had gone from minimal to £60m, with limited transparency, on the basis of wavering cost estimates. These facts were not made available at the time of the public consultation on the project in November 2013.”

“When Kiefer moved there in 1992 he needed 70 lorries to move the contents of his studio: he would need rather more now. The artist turned this quiet domain into a Brobdingnagian Gesamtkunstwerk, surely one of the most extraordinary artworks of the last century.”

“Koons is alert to a tendency on the part of the art audience to submit—to submit to something (to anything) that exerts a certain discomfiting power. This is the S&M of the contemporary art world, with the audience angling for an opportunity to grovel at the feet of the superstar.”

“Today, for new or newly relocating galleries, both commercial and nonprofit, it’s industrial warehouses — with plenty of parking — south of the 10 Freeway and east of the L.A. River.”