Category: visual

“The artworks, made by Warhol as part of a collaboration with Commodore Amiga, had been stranded on Amiga floppy disks for almost twenty years after the artist saved them in the mid-1980s. They were only discovered and rescued from their obsolete format thanks to the chance viewing of a YouTube clip.”

“Russia’s annexation of Crimea, a region rich in archaeological sites that are routinely targeted by looters, has thrust illegal excavations around the shore of the Black Sea onto the political agenda. Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, which has run archaeological digs in Crimea for decades, addressed the topic in a presentation to the Russian parliament in March, shortly after the peninsula voted to join Russia.”

“Artist Richard Wilson jammed a cardboard plane into a plastic hamster ball and bowled it along the floor, saying to engineers: ‘This is what I want! The result? An enormous 77-tonne aluminium artwork” called Slipstream that will be a centrepiece of Heathrow Airport’s new Terminal 2.

“The indictment reads in places like a forger’s manual, laying out the materials needed to forge masterpieces and how to create a fraudulent history of a painting’s creation, ownership, custody and location, known as its provenance.”

“[Such trials] are fairly banal legal processes, cases settled by a jury of peers that considers the facts and comes to a conclusion. But these human beings also become, for a period of a few hours, days, or weeks, endowed with a unique power and perspective: critics with the force of law.” Hyperallergic offers a Q&A with a member of the panel that convicted a Florida pastor of selling fake Hirsts.

“You can see them from at least three highways in Queens, rising up like futuristic beacons: a giant metal circle on top of 16 concrete pillars and three towers stretching skyward, topped by flying saucer roofs. They look like heralds of a new space age. But they were built for the 1964 World’s Fair, as part of the New York State Pavilion.”

“Scotland has unveiled the latest misbegotten “masterpiece” of public art. It is big. It is bold. And it is rotten.”

“Assessing his first year in Philadelphia, he wrote, ‘I have not been startled here as often as I would like to have been nor have I felt the energy that is generated by a city where art is important and in ferment.’ But he stayed, and over three decades observed ever-increasing energy, plenty of artistic ferment, and some startling developments.” (includes excerpts)

Glenn Lowry is “himself sometimes personally blamed for the museum’s image as a place that has become cold and corporate, that exercises its power too blithely and that is often out of touch with the sensibilities of contemporary artists.”

“While much attention has focused on the act of repatriation, The New York Times looked at what happened to several objects after they went back. Some works, returned with great fanfare, have taken on greater meaning back on view in the countries or cultures that produced them. Other times, after the triumphalism fades, they fall victim to benign neglect, or are not always easy to reach.”