Category: visual

Following the sale of William Holman Hunt’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil to pay down debt, the American Alliance of Museums revoked DAM’s accreditation and the Association of Art Museum Directors put DAM on a blacklist for receiving loans from or collaborating on shows with other museums. All this for the sake of a painting that sold for less than half Christie’s lower pre-sale estimate.

“There is a comparison to be made between what the printing press did for books and writing and what Instagram has done for photography and visual arts.”

Instead of attending a few universally acknowledged “must-see” annual events, participants are taking a more personalised approach, tailoring their trips like a Twitter feed.

“Using advances in infrared imagery, [researchers] have uncovered a hidden portrait of a bow-tied man with his face resting on his hand” underneath the 1901 painting. (Picasso evidently re-used the canvas.) “Now the question that conservators at The Phillips Collection in Washington hope to answer is simply: Who is he?”

“The dispute between the city and the museum, which has landed in court, erupted when the museum’s trustees proposed a merger with the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach. Museum of Contemporary Art officials said they are considering leaving North Miami, with the 600-piece collection, because it has outgrown its tiny home in the heart of the downtown business district.”

Galleries everywhere are awash in these brand-name reductivist canvases, all more or less handsome, harmless, supposedly metacritical, and just “new” or “dangerous”-looking enough not to violate anyone’s sense of what “new” or “dangerous” really is, all of it impersonal, mimicking a set of preapproved influences.

The artist just posed nude for an Annie Leibovitz-Vanity Fair photo spread. “Naturally, the Internet has responded. And the Naked Koons spoofs are already starting to surface – with heady references to the French avant-garde of the early 20th century and Norman Rockwell.”

“The Central Intelligence Agency, not surprisingly, refused his repeated requests to photograph its headquarters in Langley, Virginia.”

“Drawing on the country’s bold, progressive tradition of aggressive concrete and urban engineering, a generation of architects is crafting new spaces at home in a more democratic spirit.”

“Perhaps it isn’t so surprising that in this era, which some have termed the new Gilded Age, the worlds of art and real estate have once again begun to merge.”