Category: visual

Julian Spalding: “If you want a pickled shark in a tank, you don’t have to pay the $12m Steve Cohen paid for the one selected by Hirst. You only pay that much for the artistic content that Hirst has added to it. If there isn’t any, what are you buying? … Damien Hirst isn’t an artist. His works … have no artistic content and are worthless as works of art. They are, therefore, worthless financially.”

“It’s like, you say ‘sell your Hirst’. I say ‘don’t sell your Hirsts, hang on to them.’ If you look at the numbers … [art is] the greatest currency in the world.”

“There’s Beverly Hills, a residential and commercial development built in the late 1990s on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt. There’s the newly built Dubai International City, with various districts representing countries from all over the world. And there’s also Orange County, a Southern California-style gated golf community of ranch homes about an hour north of Beijing,” and Thames Town, a recreated English village 20 miles from Shanghai.

James Polchin: “I was much more attentive to the exposed flesh around me, to the blemishes and rashes, the discoloration and mutations of skin tones of those I passed. A young woman’s arm was blossoming a small purple and hazel, clover-shaped bruise near her shoulder. An attractive man’s razor burn ran along the side of his neck, a contrast to the smooth sliver of a red and blue tattoo that crawled beneath his shirt sleeve.”

Turkey has reportedly asked the Cleveland Museum of Art about 22 objects it claims were looted from its soil, including some of the most famous masterpiece in its collection.

“Google Art Project, which launched last year with virtual tours and digitized artworks from 17 museums, has added 134 new museums to its site.”

Thanks to an emir with two humanities PhDs and, notably, his educated and energetic daughter, Sharjah actively encourages both traditional and contemporary art – and makes a point of making the art accessible citizens, visitors, and even Pakistani and Filipino migrant workers.

“Conservators from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston called upon the services of nuns from Kathmandu, as well as Tibetan and Taiwanese specialists in silk brocades and Japanese fabricators of gilt-bronze decorative ornaments for an ambitious, two-year project to restore a series of 400-year-old thangkas or Tibetan paintings.”

“Mark A. Landis, who has dressed as a Jesuit priest or posed as a wealthy donor driving up in a red Cadillac, apparently never took money for his forgeries and has never been arrested. Now his ‘works’ have been collected into their own tongue-in-cheek exhibit, called Faux Real and opening on April Fools’ Day at the University of Cincinnati.”

At the Contemporary Arts Center, several New Orleans artists withdraw from a group show after the executive director agrees to close the exhibit for a week for a film shoot. It “seems that visual art gets bumped aside really quickly,” one artist said.