Category: visual

“Even rewriting the labels is a Herculean task; the institution has around 38,000 of them. The project is ‘likely to take decades,’ he says.”

Now there’s a movie: “Pray’s doc is at its grooviest when you can simply watch the surreal sight of a giant shrink-wrapped boulder moving through the streets of L.A. at night, like the world’s most ginormous frozen turkey.”

Hrag Vartanian, on the crowding that afflicts such museums as the Louvre, the Met, the Hermitage, the Tate, and the National Gallery (both U.S. and U.K.): “We need to break up the major museums. That may sound radical to some, but it’s an idea whose time has come. I’m suggesting not that museums sell off their collections but that more museums consider aggressively building outposts or prioritizing longer-term partnerships with smaller or newer institutions that could benefit from such relationships.”

“The engraved lines found on Gibraltar are said to be 40,000 years old, making them older than the the oldest-known cave paintings by Homo sapiens,which can be seen in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France. It certainly seems that the capacity for symbolic thought is not unique to Homo sapiens, but do the incised lines of Gibraltar really prove a capacity for advanced thought? Can we call them “art” at all?”

“As a result of this unanticipated and welcome rebellion, this year’s Biennale offers an unforgettably wide-ranging, if scattershot, survey of modern and contemporary 
architectural history that will forever demolish the popular notion of what modernism in architecture was.”

But nobody told Gehry – who, when notified by a reporter, said of the center’s CEO, “She says I build models. She doesn’t have a clue as to what I do or how I do it. It’s fine. It’s a new group. They should do what they want. I don’t want to go where I’m not wanted.”

“When the state appointed him president in June and dispatched him on this emergency mission, French headlines hailed [Laurent] Le Bon in the name of that fictional masked outlaw who battled tyrannical officials. And riffing on an English translation of his last name and his reputation for diplomacy, curators in the international art world called him Larry the Good.”

“Most of the ceramic items are of huge cultural and archaeological value, and date back to 1400BC. They had been smuggled out of South America … by a man who specialised in laundering money for the drug cartels.”

“The Barbican in London plans to show Exhibit B at the end of September but, as I write, 12,801 people have signed a statement calling for it to be withdrawn. The petitioners describe the Barbican’s involvement as ‘an outrageous act of complicit racism’ because the show is an ‘exercise in white racial privilege’.”