Category: visual

“Some are selling publicly-owned pieces of art worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, but the practice has proved controversial.”

“Museum staff last month began noticing that several dozen Chinese tourists with tour groups held counterfeit tickets ‘of a strange consistency, [with] poor paper quality and ink that hadn’t set properly’ … Later in August better-quality forged items began appearing with serial numbers – exact copies of the museum’s entry tickets.”

“A little more than a century ago, there was no cachet in being an ‘old college,’ and there was little cachet, too, in having the old architecture to match it. But a combination of forces – some cultural, some economic – transformed the appearance of American institutions, and made the modern-day college campus take its contemporary appearance and mythology.”

“People recognise there’s a direct association between these works and a culture that’s 40,000 years old and potentially coming to an end.”

Roberta Smith: “Were this to happen, it would be a betrayal of public trust and donors’ bequests and a violation of the museum’s nonprofit status. It also makes no economic sense. The Detroit Institute of Arts is one of the few remaining jewels in Detroit’s tattered identity, and is essential to the city’s recovery.”

Christopher Knight: “Of course I’ve only seen the 1888 painting in photographs, where it appears to be blandly pretty. … It’s also useful to be reminded that even the greatest artist doesn’t always perform at his peak. … I’m also happy to defer to the artist, who seems to have been less than thrilled with the results himself.”

“Here’s a quick, relatively inexpensive and aesthetically surefire way to construct a first-rate museum building for art. It turns out to be as simple as one, two, three.”

“In a candid submission to the Scottish Parliament committee considering The Burrell Collection (Lending And Borrowing) Bill, Dr Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, says moving works of art has led to several major accidents, incidents and damage to works, many of which have not come to public attention.”

“Even art historians and curators who have never been inside the warehouse say that based on what the owner is known to have bought at galleries and auctions over the years, the collection probably runs to more than a thousand pieces. It’s likely, they said, the largest private collection of works by California artists.”