When the Hammer Museum unveiled its “Made in LA” biennial two years ago, the decision to award $100,000 to one artist through a combination of jury selection and online voting became an unlikely lightning rod for criticism.
Category: visual
A Reporter Tracks Down Owners Of A Painting Looted By The Nazis (Here’s How)
“Critics complain that the effort to find heirs has been sluggish and inefficient, despite increased online genealogy resources and the rise of social media. So I decided to see if I could trace the ownership of any of the works.”
Is This the World’s Oldest Landscape Painting?
“Scientists have linked the eruption of Turkey’s Mount Hassan with a Neolithic painting found in the nearby proto-city of Çatalhöyük.”
How The Mayor Of London’s City Planning Is Ruining The Character Of London
“They have presided over a wealth of misconceived, mean-minded schemes that are destroying the social and physical fabric of London, lubricating the path for private enclaves of oversized, poorly designed mega-blocks, to be sold to overseas investors with little care for creating decent places to live.”
Detroit Institute of Arts to Buy Itself Back From City for $100 Million
“The Detroit Institute of Arts has pledged to raise $100 million for the federally mediated rescue fund to shore up municipal pensions, prevent the forced sale of any of the museum’s irreplaceable masterpieces and spin off the city-owned museum to an independent nonprofit.”
Tony the Tiger and Toucan Sam Help Save Detroit’s Art
“Foundations seeking to protect Detroit’s public pensions and its art museum in the city’s bankruptcy process raised their pledge total to $370 million on Tuesday with the addition of a $40 million commitment from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.”
Architect Meets Critics Face-to-Face Over MoMA’s Plan to Tear Down Folk Art Museum
“An architect typically doesn’t go before the public to defend a private project. But on Tuesday night Liz Diller of Diller Scofidio & Renfro stood before a crowd of 650 people, many of them her peers, to explain in detail the six-month process by which her firm tried to save the former home of the American Folk Art Museum before deciding it was impossible.”
Dealer/Hoarder Considers Restitution for Nazi-Looted Art
An attorney for Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive Munich collector whose trove of art, roughly valued at $1.3 billion, may be works looted by Nazi forces and sold through Gurlitt’s art dealer father, says that he will consider
Indiana Jones Had Nothing on the (Real-Life) Monuments Men
They were “a small group of art professionals, many of them from Ivy League colleges and top U.S. museums, who, in the last days of [World War II] and well after the surrender of Germany, secured and preserved millions of European cultural objects looted by the Nazis and returned them to the nations from which they had been taken.”
Lost Rembrandt Found In Edinburgh Museum Vault
“The etching, which had previously been catalogued as a copy of the portrait, is now thought to be by far the most valuable after detective work by an expert at the Edinburgh gallery.”