Category: visual

“The US Justice department said the work was purchased with money allegedly obtained through criminal activity.”

“The Russian contemporary art impresario Marat Guelman has been fired as the director of the Perm Museum of Contemporary Art, which he created in 2008 as part of a project to turn the drab military-industrial Soviet city into a modern art center like Bilbao.” At issue are the finances of a summer arts festival and several controversial exhibitions, including one critical of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics.

“Designated a landmark in 1974 and considered by many to be one of the most formal public spaces in the city, the plaza has nonetheless fallen into disrepair – its bluestone surface cracked, the gilded statue of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman eroded. Now the Central Park Conservancy is proposing a $2 million restoration of the plaza’s trees and pavement.”

The show “was supposed to crown years of effort by some American museums to patch up relations with Italy over claims of looted antiquities.”

“After hours of thinly disguised recriminations on both sides, the two leaders announced, an hour before the exhibition was due to open, they would indeed attend but there would be no joint opening and Merkel’s speech had been cancelled.”

“Are festivals and biennales dynamic catalysts to discuss and celebrate the city and architectural culture?… Or are they calculated devices of tourism and industrial promotion?”

Le Palais Contarini “fetched $30.8 million at a Sotheby’s auction in London on Wednesday after a bidding battle jacked up the selling price of the work. The auction of Impressionist and Modern art brought in a total of $165.9 million.”

“Sotheby’s, the auction house that has for centuries put other people’s treasures up for sale, is in the early days of exploring whether it should place one of its own on the block: its glittering glass-and-granite-fronted worldwide headquarters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.”

In 1995 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts “set up an authentication committee to pass judgment on artworks attributed to him. Since then several large artist-endowed foundations have adopted the same policy. None have aroused the kind of controversy and ill feeling the Warhol authentication board attracted almost from the start.”

“Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate throughout the postmodern period, and do so right up to the present moment, as though that critique never happened. Museums, foundations, government endowments, and university art departments all effortlessly absorbed a movement which was more or less devoted to destroying their conception of the arts.”