Category: visual

Artist Charlie Cobb painted three forgeries, the first of which was shown in an auction scene. “Another copy was a kind of stuntman, used when Mr. McAvoy cuts the painting out of its frame, which ‘fortunately they did in one take,’ says Mr. Cobb. The third served as an understudy, in case one of the other two fakes got damaged or disappeared.”

The winner of a British series will get to paint the official portrait of double Booker-winner Hilary Mantel after finalists go up for a vote in the National Gallery. No, really.

Steven A Cohen has bought a Picasso painting from casino mogul Steve Wynn for a record price – six years after Wynn accidentally put his elbow through it.

“The Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum reopened after a refurbishment with paintings lent by the Mauritshuis … [that] attracted 10,573 visitors a day … It was a different story in the leading museums of New York, London and Paris, where contemporary and Modern art dominated the city’s top shows.”

“One interesting factor that emerged for researchers was that the top two venues of 2012” – the Louvre in Paris and the Metropolitan Museum in New York – “had unveiled much-anticipated gallery spaces devoted to Islamic art during the year.”

“The piece as it has been presented does invite snickering. Conceptual art has been around long enough that even non-experts will now recognize certain tropes or motifs. Sitting in a glass box in an art gallery is one of them.”

“Maybe it’s not necessary to do every single brownstone in Park Slope or every single building in Alphabet City. But they’re not all exactly the same. That’s what I love about brownstones. You look at them closely, and the cornices are different, or maybe the way the steps come up to the doors is different. That’s what makes drawing different from Instagram.”

“Von Hornsleth said the collage was his artistic reaction to Stockmann’s article and claimed freedom of expression. He wanted to reply to her in his own language and the pornographic work showed how critics ‘fuck’ others in the sense that they criticise them, he said. Kabré described the collage as ‘a personal attack motivated by revenge.'”

“The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco have named Colin Bailey as their new director. Bailey, who most recently served as the deputy director and chief curator at the Frick Collection in New York, will head the De Young Museum and the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.”

“Nobody was injured in a fire that began [Monday] at the Cuming Museum in Southwark, but the blaze has destroyed the museum’s roof and two of its displays. It is believed collections in storage may have also suffered water damage.”