Category: visual

“The Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles, has pulled out of a Richard Hamilton retrospective, after the abrupt departure of its long-standing chief curator, Paul Schimmel at the end of June. Schimmel is the co-curator of the Hamilton exhibition,” which is also planned for London’s Tate Modern, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

“The man, in his late 40s, fell 100ft from a balcony at the Members’ Room onto the pavement below. He was declared dead at the scene.”

“The Chinese government plans to turn Beijing into a key art hub in Asia by building an 83,000 sq. m freeport next to the Beijing Capital International Airport scheduled for completion late 2013. Officials hope that the vast storage facility, which is expected to be tax exempt, will encourage collectors and corporations to stockpile their art in Beijing.”

“Many of the art pieces posted in the Brandalism Project have since been covered over or rededicated to the advertisers who paid for the space. That determination to clean up for the Olympics could mean London work crews painting over Banksy images, which are worth millions of dollars.”

“Economic and social factors across the ages meant that some of the grandest designs of renowned architects such as Lutyens and Inigo Jones were never completed.”

“When Jeffrey Deitch was installed the writing was on the wall: he would wait a decorous year or so, then lose Schimmel and bring in a curator or two as his pawns, putting on youth-focused exhibitions aimed at attracting young audiences through meretricious celebrity-focused publicity. The traditional audience would fade away, the youngsters would recognize MOCA’s pandering, and the institution would become an intellectually vacant party palace.”

Christopher Knight: “A certain homogenized sameness pervades the new program, which is about as boring as having the same Campbell’s soup every day for lunch. Yes, … the ghost of the late, great Pop artist, dead now for a quarter-century, hovers in the background – and sometimes steps into the foreground – of almost every exhibition conceived by Deitch in the last 18 months.”

Several caves and rock shelters in the Lower Pecos have 4000-year-old murals. Most scholars had assumed that the meaning of the paintings was unrecoverable, but archaeologist Carolyn Boyd says she’s “discovered a symbolic code that reveals narratives in the paintings, which she believes can be read, almost like an ancient language.”

“In the end, however, [Jeffrey] Deitch is no more than a symptom, one of the malign forces that emerged from the Pandora’s Box that Rauschenberg opened when he announced that he wanted to work in the gap between art and life.”

“In cleaning up London’s graffiti for the Olympics city authorities threaten to squelch the work one of its biggest celebrities, the street artist Banksy, but on Monday the secretive graffiti artist showed he wouldn’t be deterred from creating Olympics-related art while the whole world is watching.”