Category: visual

Around the country, a flurry of high quality art museums have made the switch and reaped financial rewards, but “it is hard to imagine a major museum here going free, especially when the trend in Chicago has been to raise prices and to start charging admission.”

“Regular printing—the kind your home office inkjet is capable of—uses dots of pigments to create the spectrum of colors you see on a page. The type of printing the Singapore team is investigating instead uses microscopic pillars topped with aluminum nanodisks that resonate at visible light frequencies. The process is able to produce more than 300 colors by focusing beams of electrons onto variously-sized pillars.”

“The task force investigating the art trove has declined to say how many new works were discovered. Gurlitt, who inherited the priceless collection from his father Hildebrand, an art dealer who traded in works confiscated by the Nazis, died in May. In his will, he left the art haul – more than 1,200 pieces including works by Chagall, Picasso and Matisse – to the Kunstmuseum Bern in Switzerland.”

“The only new element presented in the audit undertaken by the Tribunal de Cuentas in 2012 is the that fact 41 works have been located, the whereabouts of which had been unknown since 1978 when the first report by the Fiscalía General de Reino was published on the situation of works from the collection of the Museo del Prado on deposit with other institutions.”

“More than 50 leading figures from the worlds of art, film, fashion and architecture have signed a petition calling for a ban on giant cruise ships sailing through Venice. Cate Blanchett, Julie Christie, Michael Caine and Rob Lowe are among the signatories urging the Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and the Italian Minister of Culture and Tourism, Dario Franceschini, to ‘halt the passage of the big ships across the Bacino San Marino and along the Giudecca canal’.”

“The tomb’s discovery, at the start of the Roaring Twenties, followed the global upheavals of World War One. Mass media was able to bring news of objects being carried out of the tomb to a wider audience, faster than ever before. America, in particular, became obsessed by “King Tut” – as he became known. Even US President Herbert Hoover used the name for his pet dog.”

“A spokesperson for the museum downplayed the situation, telling the paper that many works had been lost over the years to fires and even armed conflict, but without proof of destruction or loss the records for these works remain.”

“After years of outsize promises and repeated postponements, officials now acknowledge that fund-raising travails have compelled them to scale back the grand design for the museum’s new home on Fifth Avenue.”

Megumi Igarishi, a 42-year-old sculptor and illustrator who uses the professional name Rokudenashiko (roughly “little good-for-nothing”), spent a week in custody after being arrested for distributing obscene materials. She had sent contributors to a crowdfunding campaign a file for 3D printer that would produce a replica of her vagina.

“‘The real curse is that too few scholars have devoted attention to the contents of the tomb,’ says [curator] Paul Collins, … [who] believes that specialists have shied away from serious study of the boy king’s tomb because he ‘so quickly became imbued with glamour and mystery’ in the public imagination.”