Justin Davidson, who recently completed a Wright tour through Pennsylvania and Wisconsin: “This processional of midwestern masterpieces reminds us that great architecture is not always the most sensible solution, or the most frugal, or the sturdiest. Sometimes it’s brilliantly insane.”
Category: visual
Frank Gehry’s New Parisian Palais
“Despite its echoes of Paris’s architectural past, Frank Gehry’s latest museum project – the Fondation Louis Vuitton, opening this fall in the Bois de Boulogne – is like nothing the city has seen before … Paul Goldberger looks at the genesis of LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault’s partnership with Gehry, and the triumphant result.”
Court Approves Corcoran Gallery Merger
D.C. Superior Court Judge Robert Okun: “This court finds it painful to issue an order that effectively dissolves the Corcoran as an independent entity. But this court would find it even more painful to deny the relief requested and allow the Corcoran to face its likely demise – the likely dissolution of the college, the closing of the gallery, and the dispersal of the gallery’s entire collection.”
Beyond The Merger: Five Additional Points From The Corcoran Ruling
“Hidden within the ruling are several other important findings” – among them that the D.C. attorney general isn’t finished with the Corcoran just yet.
Will Selfies With The Great Masters Encourage Us To Lose Even More Touch With The Real World?
“Even if you are left cold by art, your view of this contention matters: if it is true, then so is the broader claim that the 21st century is leaving us incapable of deep engagement with anything.”
The Guercino Stolen Last Weekend Was Just Sitting Around Unprotected And Uninsured
“According to the parish priest Gianni Gherardi, who reported the theft, the church could not afford to insure the painting. Its alarm system – fitted during a renovation in the mid-1990s that was financed by the local bank Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena – had been inactive since the funds dried up.”
What Kind Of Art We Should See After Ferguson
“The piece is a stunning reflection of a society that is grappling with the notion of African American men as threats; that there might be places where they should and shouldn’t be.”
London’s National Gallery (FINALLY) Allows Photography – Yes, Including Selfies With Self-Portraits
“What’s this going to do to art? What’s it going to do to a generation? … Once you stick your big face in the foreground, the experience is different again, less like art and more like going to the seaside and putting your head above the body of a wrestler in a swimming costume.”
Why Are So Many Old Art Exhibitions Being Revived?
The Armory Show of 1913, Hitler’s 1937 “Degenerate Art” exhibition, MoMA’s The Photographic Object 1970, the 1966 show that introduced America to Minimalism, the infamous human zoo from 1914, and numerous others – why recreate entire assemblages by other curators, and why now? (Yes, of course there are good reasons.)
Eastern Ukraine Museums Warned To Hide Their Collections
“Culture officials in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions in eastern Ukraine have ordered museums to put their most valuable pieces into storage, and some institutions have closed to the public … Ukraine’s culture ministry has also asked that the media refrain from ’emphasising objects of cultural heritage’ to avoid their being targeted [in the ongoing fighting].”