Category: visual

A letter sent last year by the emirate’s top cultural and tourism official to the Louvre’s director reveals that “the museum has, since 2007, been sitting on €25m, which the Gulf state paid the Louvre for spaces on one floor of its Pavillon de Flore … to be opened to the public and named in honour of … the founder of the United Arab Emirates.”

“The Norwegian national government has indicated that it will help fund Oslo’s Munch Museum, as long as the city’s politicians can resolve their differences and the collection moves to a new building.”

“Much has always been made of the fact that [Jeff] Koons is in league with the plutocrats and once worked on Wall Street, selling commodities. But he’s always been quick to refuse the art world’s carefully patrolled shibboleths – that work has personal meaning, that it must contain some social criticism, that it express ambivalence about the art market. Koons does not make ambivalent work.”

Jerry Saltz: “Here we go again. A handful of politicians and citizens get their low-information artistic panties in a twist, get insulted by whatever work of public art they decide offends them … Especially if there’s a penis or vagina involved and if the location of the public sculpture happens to be one of the most extraordinary spaces in all of Christendom.”

“The 10th century Khmer statues, known as the Kneeling Attendants, have flanked the entrance to the Met’s South East Asian galleries for years and are among the museum’s most prized objects from the region.”

“He’ll rebuild. It’s what he does and who he is — a soulful genius, part gadfly and part visionary, 100% original and as charming as a kitten and as stubborn as a hound dog when it comes to his work. And the meaning of the project will once again deepen, accumulating another layer of expressive history tied to the epic struggle of modern Detroit and the power of art to transform experience and remake the world.”

“Most people want to hold onto their past as it was, but Mr. Ficalora has found greater comfort in obliterating it, bathing the neighborhood in paint.”

“In honor of Karl Marx’s 195th birthday, Hörl has spread out 500 plastic figurines of the famous thinker in Trier, the western German city near the border with Luxembourg where Marx was born.”

“The Nazi connection, the lawsuit says, creates ‘a cloud on title’–uncertainty over who is the rightful owner–that renders the painting unsaleable and without value.”