Category: visual

The National Portrait Gallery adds extra hours to accommodate the overflow of visitors for the popular exhibit.

You want to get a date at MoMA? Here’s a (short, snappy, questionable) guide.

“The 340-ton boulder — still shrink-wrapped, lighted with string lights and resting in a steel sling on its custom transporter — pulled up to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art at exactly 4:25 a.m., as planned.” More than 500 people were waiting for it and cheering it on.

“During the latest Art Basel [fair], a collector agreed to buy a $250,000 painting – while sitting in a hair salon in Los Angeles, looking at the work on her tablet. These days, anyone with an iPad can create their own Damien Hirst painting, thanks to an app from the Gagosian Gallery … Some museum and gallery apps allow visitors to zoom in on a work for a closer look than they would get with the naked eye.”

“After a few brief words of praise, the city Art Commission gave its unanimous blessing Wednesday to a soaring Ellsworth Kelly sculpture proposed by the Barnes Foundation for its new site on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.”

“The Louvre dates the Mona Lisa to 1503-06. It has now been realised, however, that part of the painted background was based on a drawing of rocks that Leonardo made in 1510-15.”

“Vikan joined the Walters in 1985 as the assistant director for curatorial affairs and curator of medieval art, and served as director since 1994. Before that, Vikan worked at Dumbarton Oaks. His resignation is effective June 2013.”

“In the Chinese art world today, many artists are taking Chinese antiquity as their inspiration and reinterpreting it. And one focus of their attention is Chinese scholars’ rocks: complex and often bizarre natural formations, collected and admired for more than a thousand years.”

Adam Lerner’s business cards give his title as “Director and Chief Animator, Department of Fabrications.” His popular lecture series offers events like “Nietzsche and Puppies, Puppies, Puppies!” He and his institution are a major hit.

“Visitors to the Rijksmuseum will soon be able to see Vermeer’s newly restored Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, 1663-64, when it returns home following a Japanese tour which funded the work’s restoration.”