Category: visual

Artist Francesco Vezzoli “had contracted to buy the ruins of an old deconsecrated church in the southern Italian town of Montegiordano and had planned to ship them to New York, brick by brick, for exhibition in the courtyard of MoMA PS1. His videos would be shown inside.” The Italian authorities had other ideas.

In a newly published paper, economist P.H. Franses of the Erasmus School of Economics in the Netherlands reports that “painters create their most masterful works (at least as determined by the marketplace) “at the 0.618 fraction of their lives.”

“They started with a list of more than 10,000 artists, they said, culled from recommendations from friends, curators, artists, peers and others; then they whittled it down to roughly 1,000 studio visits in each region of the country. About 100 to 125 of those artists — across mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, multimedia, performance and others — will be included in a fall 2014 exhibition at the museum.”

Urban pride through architecture: it’s not such a novel idea, he says. “If you live in Greece, you are proud of the Parthenon, if you live in New York you are proud of the Chrysler Building. Here in LA we have the ‘Hollywood’ sign.” This is delivered so drily that I almost think he means it, until he gives himself away with another laugh.

“Science has its limits. Paint or paper may help establish the date of a work, while hair and fibers can help pinpoint where it was made. A work’s provenance must also be verified. Still, connoisseurs — as well as most auction houses who rely on them — maintain that true authorship cannot be established without an expert evaluation.”

“The selfie is a deliberate, aesthetic expression–it’s a self-portrait, which is an artistic genre with an extremely long pedigree. There can be bad self-portraits and good self-portraits, but the self-portrait isn’t bad or good in itself.”

“Visiting an art museum exposes students to a diversity of ideas that challenge them with different perspectives on the human condition. “

The best part? The scientists were demoralized and about to go home depressed when they found the bones in Utah.

“German museums are obligated to go through their collections for works that may have been looted by the Nazis. But the museums have balked at going a step further and digitizing their collections to allow independent searches, citing budget restrictions and a lack of staff.”

“A federal court judge set a hearing date Wednesday in the 15-month dispute over who owns a tiny Renoir painting that was stolen in 1951 from the Baltimore Museum of Art, but she also urged both parties to consider settling.”