Category: visual

The skill of the forger surely should be taken into account. And the skill it takes to create (recreate?) great art is surely worth something in its own right…

Jerry Saltz: “Biennials have become sprawling and ubiquitous. Ditto art fairs. Galleries are vaster than they’ve ever been. But who is all this bigness good for? Is it any good at all?”

“Envisioned as a symbol of London looming over the site of this summer’s Olympic Games, the Orbit, which visitors will enter, ascend and explore, is designed as an attraction to rival the London Eye and Big Ben for decades to come. And, at least for now, the sculpture is also serving as a prime target for British Olympic crankiness.”

“The Cambodian government is convinced that two life-size 10th-century statues that have anchored the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Southeast Asian galleries for nearly two decades were looted from a jungle temple and plans to ask for their return.”

“For cultural workers, more than just food and rent, work is bound up with desires around creativity, ego, authorship and individual performance. These also circulate within the pedagogies of art. In fact often, art school training puts the emphasis on the work coming first over and above everything else including individual subsistence.”

“When I first visited in the 1970s, it seemed old-fashioned; among today’s ubiquitous white cube displays and curator-led, thematic shows, the abundance and randomness look radical. What museum curator now would dare present, say, as artist Alison Wilding has in the sculpture galleries, some hundred works assembled as if they had just fallen off a lorry into a storeroom?”

The pillar of steam “is planned to rise 1.2m (2 km) into the air above the Wirral waterfront on the Mersey, standing at Birkenhead’s East Dock directly opposite the Pier Head in Liverpool.”

“On Tuesday, a foundation he set up paid $27.75 million to buy a 25-foot-wide Beaux Arts mansion on East 82nd Street, with a plan to turn the five-story space into an education center and a small museum to celebrate the artist’s work and burnish his reputation.”

“Here the Muslims strictly oppose images; to recreate the Buddhas would be an insult even to non-Taliban Afghans. We must show good manners.”

“So far, Columbia University, the Frick Collection, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Art Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Institute of the History of Art (INHA) in Paris, the University of Malaga in Spain and Heidelberg University in Germany have contributed. In all cases, the full digital texts of the books can be downloaded free of charge.”