Category: visual

“At area art museums, the job of chief curator appears to be edging toward the endangered species list. Three notable chief curators have left their museum jobs in the past year. Successors are nowhere in sight.”

“The Louvre is the world’s busiest art museum, according to figures compiled by the Art Newspaper, and attracts nearly nine million visitors a year. Lens’s ambitions are more modest.”

“Is it art, this potty spectacle of a white man ridiculing the work of black artist Andrès Serrano, placing a black man in a jar of urine (while also attacking the work of black artist Chris Ofili as an aside)?”

“It has been home to tsars and one of the finest art collections on Earth. Now with a new wing slowly opening to the public, the Hermitage in St Petersburg is inching its way into contemporary art, a controversial world in a country regularly accused of censorship.”

Affecting a French accent, Beck questioned whether liberal art critics would show the same level of tolerance for art with politically conservative themes. He then submerged the Obama figurine in the jar of “pee-pee.”

“This week, in the biggest overhaul of the system in decades, museum director Michael Govan announced that he was raising dues for members of all 10 councils to $1,000, which does not include a $250-level museum membership they must now purchase each year.”

“There are sundry problems bedeviling the contemporary art scene. Here are eight that spring readily to mind…”

Former Harvard president (and current Barnes trustee) Neil Rudenstine “argues that by moving to Philadelphia, the Barnes Foundation simply rescued itself from inevitable financial ruin” – and that Albert Barnes himself bears no small responsibility for that predicament.

“Hopper’s Americaness has so often been his story, despite the fact that he himself was quite dubious of such a label. ‘The French painters didn’t talk about the ‘French Scene,’ or the English painters the ‘English Scene’,” was Hopper’s usual response to claims of his art’s geographical specificities.”