Category: visual

“A former gas station, car dealership and dental school building are helping to transform central Johannesburg from a hotbed of crime to a hub for art. The repurposed buildings make up the Wits Art Museum, which open[ed] Saturday as a showcase for African art.”

A ten-year civil war, the end of monarchy and subsequent political turmoil have begun to transform what had been Nepal’s tradition-heavy and somewhat stultified visual arts. For instance, one recent, and representativce, mural added to mountain peaks and curlicue winds a gas pump, a retreating bus, and a visa to somewhere abroad.

“Around the world, followers of architecture with a capital A have focused so much of their attention on formal experiments, as if aesthetics and social activism, twin Modernist concerns, were mutually exclusive. But Medellín is proof that they’re not, and shouldn’t be. Architecture, here and elsewhere, acts as part of a larger social and economic ecology, or else it elects to be a luxury, meaningless except to itself.”

A nude Stephen Harper reclining like the Rokeby Venus or Olympia? OK, it’s art – but Twitter doesn’t deal with it well.

“The donation includes the entire photographic estate of Charles Sheeler – 2,500 photographs – and the same number of photographs by Edward Weston. Complementing these are 500 photographs by Ansel Adams, and 100 each by Imogen Cunningham and Brett Weston, Edward’s son.”

“When you’re involved close up with something like that you start to worry about the ethos of the Olympics and whether the original spirit of the Games is really reflected in what we have now,” artist Neville Gabie said

“Lynn Bennett-Mackenzie had placed 200 small wood houses in 19 locations along a forest trail at Inverewe Gardens, owned by the National Trust of Scotland. But a large part of her work in Wester Ross has been stolen – with bags of dog waste being put in its place among trees nearby.”

Sure, more people will come to Philly to see the new Barnes. But “the repackaging of the Barnes may also be seen as the latest in a string of changes to Philadelphia that dilute its special character — advancements that bring Philadelphia into conformity with what visitors from other places may expect, but that also render the city more generic.”

“Under the U.S. Copyright Act (in contrast to many copyright regimes in Europe), once a piece of art is sold all rights to the physical work belong to the buyer. No matter how much the art appreciates in value, artists aren’t due a penny when the work is resold. All of the profits belong to sellers, not to creators.There is only one exception to that rule in the United States: the 1977 California Resale Royalties Act, a so-called droit de suite law that grants artists a continuing interest in their work when it changes hands.” Now a judge has said the California law is unconstitutional – sorry, artists.

“Was the 2011 joint turnover of the Chinese auction houses $154.2bn, $148.5bn, $88.1bn – or much less?”