Category: visual

“The newly renovated halls feature more than 500 artifacts that mainly date back to the Hellenistic period (312-139 B.C.), some of which were retrieved and renovated after the looting of the museum following the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.”

A male artist (it’s always a male artist, isn’t it?) named Istvan Kantor, who has a history of this sort of thing, splashed red paint on a gallery wall in an X shape and scrawled “Monty Cantsin was here” before being led away – to a mental ward, from which, he has tweeted, he has now been released.

“If someone helps another person commit a crime, he’s an accessory to the illegal act and probably guilty of an infraction.” But if an art museum commits the ethics violation of selling off art for operating money, is the dealer who handles the sale doing anything wrong?

The decision is “to use a channel in the lagoon called the Canale Contorta Sant’Angelo to bring the vast cruise ships into the port of Venice instead of sending them through the city. … It is like stopping juggernauts from travelling along the London Embankment by rerouting the same traffic and more down a new highway across Hyde Park.”

The flag that flew at Fort McHenry only came in a distant second, with Woody Guthrie’s original recording of “This Land is Your Land” placing third and the “Lansdowne” portrait of George Washington in fourth.” And the winner isn’t even the Smithsonian’s property, technically.

“The reinterring of the stables, which once hosted horses raced at the Circus Maximus, is another blow to anniversary plans after Rome failed to find funds in time to restore Augustus’ mausoleum, a city block-sized monument which has been used as a toilet by tramps since falling into disrepair, and now stands mouldering behind fences in the centre of Rome.”

“Earlier this month, a painting by the artist Hong Seong-dam was removed from an exhibition … following pressure by the Gwangju city government … The picture depicts the South Korean president Park Geun-hye being assailed by the families of children who died in the country’s MV Sewol ferry disaster last April.”

“A powerful lobby has supported [Swiss] legislation that would prevent tobacco companies” – such as Oettinger Davidoff – “from sponsoring major events, such as Art Basel. A similar law is already in effect across the European Union, and Swiss interior minister Alain Berset is a a powerful backer of this new one.”

The “Core Project” is the first of three stages of the museum’s Frank Gehry-designed expansion. “[It] involves tearing out the existing auditorium, which sits directly beneath the Great Stair Hall, and replacing it with a space labeled the Forum.” Thomas Hine argues that the Forum, as planned, misses every opportunity it has – and it forgets “the whisper”.

“[The capital’s] main Modern and contemporary art museum will expand its permanent exhibition space by a total of 3,000 sq. m by the end of 2015. … The project will ‘finally’ join the Francisco Sabatini-designed building, which fully opened as an art museum in 1992, with the extension by Jean Nouvel, completed in 2005.”