Category: visual

“In a way that is at once superbly ordered and open-ended, densely structured and, upon first encounter, deceptively unassuming, the exhibition manages both to reinvent the signature show of the Whitney Museum of American Art and to offer a bit of redemption for the out-of-control, money-saturated art world.”

“The 340-ton boulder traveling from Riverside to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art continued to be a big crowd pleaser Thursday on the second pit spot of its 105-mile journey, this time in Ontario.”

“Three Museum of Contemporary Art officials with key financial roles — the chief operating officer, fundraising director and a trustee who chaired the board’s finance committee — have left MOCA in the last three months. They had been at their posts less than a year.”

“For years conservators have known that beneath the surface lies the ghost of a figure – a three-quarter-length view of a man with a mustache – which Picasso had painted over. … Now a grant from the Bank of America’s Art Conservation Project will give the Guggenheim enough money to try to find out.”

“Qatari buyers make up to 25 percent of the Middle East’s $11 billion art market … The emirate itself was the world’s biggest buyer in the art market by value last year,” paying fearsomely high prices for works by the likes of Cézanne and Rothko to adorn its glittering new museums.

“Critics of the Qatar royal family say it is behaving as a facilitator of the international art scene while at the same time using it for self-promotion. And rather than letting the art scene in Qatar grow naturally according to the needs of its people to express themselves, these observers say, the country is handpicking artists who are politically neutral. In such an atmosphere, most local artists do not stand much of a chance.”

“Cambodia has asked the United States government for help in recovering a thousand-year-old statue of a mythic warrior that sits in limbo at Sotheby’s in New York and that some experts believe was looted amid the convulsions of the Vietnam War and the killing fields of the Khmer Rouge.”

“We object to the biennial in its current form because it upholds a system that benefits collectors, trustees, and corporations at the expense of art workers,” the letter states. The correspondence is signed by the Arts & Labor group of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

“Officials have banned an artist from publicly slaughtering chickens in eastern Kansas, saying the proposed art installation would amount to animal cruelty.”