Category: visual

“Rooted in the prized soil of [the] Parc de Saint-Cloud, home of Marie Antoinette’s rose garden, the trees bear faces that are alternately twisted in grimaces, bellowing in anger or frowning in the intensest way possible. … Photographer and light artist Clément Briend is responsible for summoning this hostile hardwood.”

“Art.sy-ing feels more like shopping for designer clothes online than walking through an art gallery in real life. For fashion, e-commerce has been a boon with no signs of bust. But it hasn’t revolutionized the industry by making unknown designers suddenly famous, as MySpace did bands. Rather, it’s forced the establishment to design with an eye to how clothes look online, perhaps sacrificing how they feel on the body.”

James Hart Dyke painted portraits of real MI6 spies – and then was asked to portray all six James Bonds, which turned out to be surprisingly more exciting.

Camille Paglia’s new book has some terrible moments (George Lucas as art god?), but it’s not bad, only obsessed: “If she is to be believed, pretty much every work of art since ancient Egypt has been about penises, vaginas and how ever the twain shall meet.”

“For more than a dozen years the Upper East Side gallery Knoedler & Company was ‘substantially dependent’ on profits it made from selling a mysterious collection of artwork that is at the center of a federal forgery investigation, former clients of this former gallery have charged in court papers.”

Art thieves are damn good at stealing – and terrible at selling what they’ve stolen. Oops.

“The gallery abruptly closed last year after more than 160 years in business. Now the Getty Research Institute is acquiring for an undisclosed sum the sales books documenting the Hermitage deals, among other resources that make up Knoedler’s vast private archives. The trove of sales books, artists’ letters, telegrams, photographs and rare books will fill up three large shipping containers.”

Just after the Revolution, Fidel hit on the idea of repurposing a posh suburban golf course as the new national training ground for artists. “[The architects’] design, a spiral of Catalan-vaulted rooms and covered passageways, was, like many acts of revolutionary architecture, a search for new and organic forms.” Alas, before it was fully built, the design was found to be ideologically impure and abandoned – but only for a couple of decades …

“A painting by the celebrated American pop artist, Roy Lichtenstein, has been returned to the owner’s widow in New York more than 40 years after it disappeared.”

“The Beltracchis cleverly exploited the blindness and gullibility that pervades the high-stakes world of art, where connoisseurship and provenance can get lost in the frenzy of excitement over a new find.”