Category: visual

“No doubt the new building’s official dedication will open the way to a necessary debate over its merits as architecture and urbanism, its turbulent design history and the compromises made over the long years it took to get the thing built. But in one important respect, One World Trade Center has already succeeded. It has reclaimed the sky. And this is the view from there.”

“The Biennial is the most purely narcissistic of all New York art world events, an orgy of navel-gazing that can leave a bad feeling—a sense of unease, if not disgust.”

“The Toledo Museum of Art said it saw no signs of trouble when it bought the small bronze statue of a Hindu deity in 2006 from a New York dealer now charged in India. The statue resembles an idol now listed as stolen in India.”

“What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time.”

“Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those people.”

Jerry Saltz: “I kept hearing myself think, I see dead art: Work that looks and behaves like it is supposed to look and behave but that doesn’t make us see differently, that doesn’t rethink form, reimage structure, or explore material, color, or new orders.”

“The hunt for Indian antiquities allegedly smuggled into New York by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan gallery owner accused of overseeing a $100 million art trafficking ring, led to a Queens warehouse Tuesday where federal officials seized hundreds of Southeast Asian and Indian items that they valued at $8 million.”

“The people that put money in this place could have gotten a villa in Italy, too, or bought more apartments in New York City. So there is a decision on the part of the citizens here that reflects that attitude.”

Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said he was “unblocking many measures which will get the machine working”. He added the EU could be “sure that Italy is taking care of Pompeii, both in terms of emergency measures and in the long term”.