Category: visual

“In a broadside at the proposed change, France’s top museums” – including the Louvre, Versailles and the Pompidou Centre – “sent a letter to the government warning that such a move could drive historic collections out of France and wreak destruction on the art world.”

Nicholas Penny: “The art form I don’t relate to – I’d put it more strongly actually – is video because it seems to me so often merely to be an incompetent form of film, made with the excuse that it is untainted by … the entertainment industry. I’m not very impressed by conceptual art nor very often by performance art. I’m uneasy with some aspects of the legacy of Marcel Duchamp.”

“Amateur restorations have always been a problem. In the US, you buy a Reader’s Digest so you can fix your plumbing or your gutters, so why not also try to fix your paintings?”

“Frieze has more than doubled in size in its ten years of life.”

“Kahn drew up the design in 1973, rendering it with soft charcoal on yellow tracing paper. He had readied it for construction in 1974, but New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, a prime mover of the project, became vice president to Gerald Ford and got distracted by mightier demands.”

” ‘Abstract Painting (809-4),’ sold at Sotheby’s contemporary art evening auction in London on Friday for £21.3 million $34.2 million–more than anyone has ever paid at auction for a work by a living artist.”

Architect Karen Lantz tried to make a house wherein everything was made in the U.S.A. That turned out to be a bit of a challenge.

A new plant science institute in Cambridge “that achieves at many levels – in blending a world-class science facility with a public social space in a highly energy efficient building.”

“The Vancouver Art Gallery is currently housed in a 1906 provincial courthouse that was renovated by Arthur Erickson Architects before its opening in 1983. People may love the location, but it’s hard to find anyone in the visual-art community who thinks the space is adequate.” What – or where – is the VAG’s next move? Artists, the board, the gallery director, and a prominent donor don’t see eye to eye.

How does New York’s struggling South Street Seaport Museum responsibly deaccession some of its ships? That’s hard to figure out when the original homes don’t want the ships back.