Category: visual

Speaking of endless reproducibility … Artist Cosmo Wenman “has been casing some of the world’s great sculptures for at-home replication, photographing them from every angle in plain sight inside the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Britain, the British Museum and a few others.” He uses the images to construct digital files from which a 3D printer can produce quite respectable copies.

“It wasn’t until the 21st Century that a residential building exceeded the height of the Eiffel Tower on the planet earth. We looked up to towers until their biggest selling point became looking down on us… While the towers of old were about creating powerful religious, civic or commercial symbols, the residential ones show what people are willing to pay to live above the rest of us.”

“The count of the known dispersed holdings of the French dealer and collector Ambroise Vollard (1866-1939) has just increased by one. Group of Trees, 1890, a watercolour by Paul Cézanne, has surfaced at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.”

“Here in Tokyo, a cheek-by-jowl city with many outdated high-rises and tough recycling and environmental restrictions, Japanese companies are perfecting what might be called stealth demolition. Some tall buildings are dismantled from the top down, the work hidden by a moving scaffold, others from the bottom up, the entire structure being slowly jacked down.”

Wrote the jury chairman, “A later jury cannot re-open, or second guess the work of an earlier jury, and none has ever done so … Let us assure you, however, that Ms. Scott Brown remains eligible for the Pritzker Award [in future].”

“As cities go, hollowed-out Flint might have the worst reputation in America. But the Flint Public Art Project wants to change that.”

“That is three highly publicised art attacks in less than a year. It looks as if a shared spirit is gripping the assailants. In all three cases over just a few months, each attacker thought she or he was making some kind of public statement.”

“The report makes no mention of monetizing the museum or its art to raise money to pay down the city’s massive debt. But the report does not rule out the possibility that the museum might be asked to contribute revenue as part of the restructuring plan as it evolves.”

“The art collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is held by the City of Detroit in charitable trust for the people of Michigan, and no piece in the collection may thus be sold, conveyed, or transferred to satisfy city debts or obligations.”