Category: visual

“Ai has always been a conceptual artist. The challenge of a conventional museum exhibition is that his output has become more and more immaterial. It could be that Mr. Ai is now best reflected in other ways.”

“In another sign that the smart money set is selling art this auction season, investment banker Herb Allen said his family is planning to auction off a Claude Monet painting of a water lily pond for between $30 million and $50 million next month in New York.”

“They don’t have a lot in common other than nudity, but two Getty Center exhibitions this summer, ‘Herb Ritts: L.A. Style’ and ‘Gustav Klimt: The Magic of Line,’ drew some of the biggest crowds the museum has ever seen.”

“A 17th-century workman, for example, had added his own graffiti touches to the frescoes before covering them over, including one that is familiar to school toilets across the western world: a depiction of a full set of male genitalia scratched into an angel’s wing.”

“With 275 galleries and 50 museums and institutions as partners, Art.sy has already digitized 20,000 images into its reference system, which it calls the Art Genome Project. But as it extends the platform’s reach, Art.sy also raises questions about how (or if) digital analytics should be applied to visual art. Can algorithms help explain art?”

Adonne Khare’s Elephants, a 13-by-8-foot pencil drawing of the pachyderms to which the artist added throughout the exhibition, won the $200,000 top award, given by popular vote, at ArtPrize in Grand Rapids. This year the event added a Juried Grand Prize of $100,000, which Displacement, 13208 Klinger, an installation of found objects from a vacant house in Detroit.

“It is the latest act of art vandalism, stretching back to 455 AD when the Vandals invaded Rome, destroyed numerous artworks, and became forever associated with the wilful defacement of art.”

“Before the latest incident, people took to the streets in Libya’s capital city, Tripoli, demanding that the newly elected parliament intervene to protect the country’s vulnerable cultural heritage.”

“The paints are here, the brushes are here — the only problem is having to wait for work,” he said.

“When good design shows up in places where no one thinks it will — and where no one might actually notice if it was missing — that has to say something positive about a city’s self-esteem. And frankly, its good taste.”