Category: visual

“Over the course of two hot, humid months at the tail end of the monsoon season, 20,000 new structures come up around the city for [Durga Puja], celebrated over five days in September or October. These temporary temples, called pandals, “have become giant art installations, ‘pandal-hopping’ a kind of gallery crawl.”

“Perhaps the greatest challenge facing the institution has been how to tell art’s story in the 20th century and on and yet be ever mindful of the fact that it had neither the desire nor the resources to transform itself into a Russian equivalent of MoMA.”

Live-event “artwork appears to be the visual equivalent of a vinyl record or typewriter: a throwback that is treasured precisely because it has been eclipsed.”

“None of the modern memorials can match [the Cenotaph]. Walking around them this week, I was struck by how they divided between banal literalism and meaningless abstraction.”

“There’s no reason to believe art shouldn’t be as much in the thrall of the horrors and heroism of war as Renoir was to his boating parties.”

“Long live the creepy crawlies, the bugs, the tiny wigglers and wrigglers, the minuscule parasites and nematodes, the mites and oribatids and all the myriad life forms that buzz, crawl and throb below our feet.” Or so photographer David Liittschwager wants us to think.

In D.C., the Corcoran is searching for a new director; wants to sell its old digs and find new ones; and says it wants to change its relationship with the Corcoran College of Art and Design. What gives? And what will happen next?

“The setting sun is low in the sky as a line of gassed soldiers, their sightless eyes covered by strips of cloth, stumbles toward the dressing station, a tent whose guy ropes are seen at the far right. Each soldier grasps the shoulder of the man in front of him, and most still hold their Enfield rifles and carry their now useless gas masks in canvas bags.”

“On another level, MSU’s former Kresge Art Museum has been transformed overnight from a ho-hum university museum and collection into a center for contemporary art with global ambitions and international scope.”

The museum director said “the cuts were necessary following the death in 2009 of the museum’s founder, Dr. Robert Gumbiner, who donated significantly to the museum. “He would write a check at the end of the year to cover whatever shortfall there was. He’s no longer here. But the culture of the museum was operating like he was.”