“If you’ve been to see contemporary art in the last three decades, you will probably be familiar with the feelings of bafflement, exhaustion or irritation that gallery prose provokes.”
Category: visual
The Debate Over Blockbuster Exhibitions, Part 973 (Public Vs. Private)
“If you receive public money, I think you should attempt to do more difficult things. As a contemporary artist, it pains me that it’s very hard for an institution to make a really huge group exhibition of contemporary art.”
Rembrandt Resists Scientists
“Researchers had previously probed the painting with infrared, neutron and conventional X-ray methods, but could not see the behind the top coat, largely because Rembrandt used the same paint (with the same chemical composition) for the underpainting and the final version.”
The Never-Before-Told Story Of The World’s First Computer Art
“During a time when computing power was so scarce that it required a government-defense budget to finance it, a young man used a $238 million military computer, the largest such machine ever built, to render an image of a curvy woman on a glowing cathode ray tube screen.”
How A Hotel Room Changed Matisse’s Art
“In ‘fake, absurd, terrific, delicious’ hotel rooms, ones that turned natural light into theatrical lighting, he found that ‘the richness and the silver clarity of the light of Nice’ had been trapped and condensed, intensified even when gathered in shade, and bounced from wall to wall and ceiling to floor in a kind of dizzying ebullience.”
How Bernini Outshines Even Michelangelo
“When Donatello and Michelangelo sculpted David, they transmuted his rock-throwing dynamism to monumental potential. Bernini’s David actually swings the sling, his face all screwed up in concentration like yours or mine would be, with every little muscle picked out and straining. One tends to think there is a dimension missing, when in fact there is an extra dimension present: natural humanity.”
US Court Considers ‘Last Great Holocaust Art Restitution Case’
“The unusual case was brought by heirs and relatives of a legendary Hungarian art collector in a dispute over possession of more than 40 artworks valued at $100 million – including some paintings in the collections of Hungarian museums – that were stolen by the Nazis during World War II.”
Ai Weiwei Can Turn Even Mourning Into A Subversive Act
“How do we honor the dead? How do we commit them to memory? And how do we come to terms with the way they died?” Especially when they died in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that Chinese authorities tried to cover up.
Three Arrested In Major Art Heist Case
” ‘Three people have been arrested, but unfortunately we did not get the paintings back,’ a Dutch police spokeswoman confirmed. Seven masterpieces by artists including Picasso and Monet were stolen from the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam.”
Protest Art Enters The Museum (And A New Generation Arises)
“As the activist art of a half-century ago, like the agitprop art before it, enters museum collections, a new generation is developing its own esthetic.”