Category: visual

“To a great extent the Clark, which is known especially for its holdings in French Impressionism and 19th-century academic painting plus a handful of Renaissance masterpieces, has done this by doubling down, intensifying but also elaborating its founders’ mission: the individualistic contemplation of art within domestically scaled spaces in a pastoral setting.”

“The small plastic LOVE signs that began popping up on telephone poles around town this spring put a smile on many faces in the Crescent City. Though they occupied the same space as grassroots street advertisements, they didn’t seem to have anything to sell. Because they are generically designed and commercially produced, they didn’t look like conventional graffiti or street art. Because they are rather small and seek to share such a universally upbeat message, they are difficult to dislike … even if they are illegal.”

“A good deal of the outrage directed at the idea of selling off art from Detroit’s museum is a backlash against the vague idea that doing so would mean rejecting art as a whole, or would amount to a declaration that the residents of Detroit do not deserve to enjoy art. On the contrary. I can think of no higher expression of Van Gogh’s artistic worth than the fact that Detroit could—with the sale of a single one of his paintings—provide water to all of its citizens.”

“Museum officials envision the tower, rising above a planned Metropolitan Transportation Authority subway station at Wilshire and Orange Grove Avenue, as having a hotel and condominiums. It would also contain LACMA galleries, including a new architecture and design wing and, potentially, architect Frank Gehry’s archives.”

In an essay titled “The Birth of Bad Taste”, Barry Schwabsky argues that “long before Matisse, the Italian artists of the sixteenth century who came to be known as Mannerists were willing to twist their figures out of proportion, and they did so to create not convincing images, but convincing paintings.”

“A 4,000-year-old Egyptian statue has been sold by Northampton Borough Council for nearly £16m – and there are calls for more local authorities to cash in on their art and artefacts as councils come under financial strain.”

“The preliminary document, released Wednesday after eight months of research and ahead of a full report due at the end of the year, cites several shocking oversights; for example, the Louvre is critiqued for storing Classical sculptures in a subterranean chamber that could not be properly evacuated in the event of an overflow of the Seine river.”

“The first formal valuation of the entire city-owned collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts finds that the roughly 60,000 pieces of art are worth between $2.8 billion and $4.6 billion.” Unless they’re actually sold, in which case they’d bring in a lot less.

The Art Fund’s £100,000 prize went to the 500-acre Yorkshire Sculpture Park, which the judges cited as “a truly outstanding museum with a bold artistic vision.”

“The opening would come 20 years after the 2003 arrival of the $284-million Walt Disney Concert Hall. Govan said LACMA would be continuing the “movement” that the acclaimed concert hall launched. The new LACMA would show that L.A. was, in effect, not a one-hit wonder, but a city capable of charting an ambitious, ongoing course of increasing and revitalizing its cultural offerings.”