ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

VISUAL

The Inevitability Of Fake Art

It's every art dealer's nightmare, but if a fake is a beautiful painting, what's our problem with it? We care about authorship is why - but humans didn't always care. "What mattered before the Renaissance was the meaning of an image, not the ineffable singularity of the image-maker’s touch." - Hyperallergic

The Art Of Doing Nothing Architecturally. It’s A Revolution

In a world in which flamboyance and style have long determined how an architect becomes a star, this approach – doing nothing – is an act of resistance. The fact that, 30 years into their career, Lacaton and Vassal have now been awarded the built environment’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize is a revolution. As the jury put it, Lacaton...

Workers Start Cutting 1000 150-Year-Old Oaks To Rebuild Notre Dame’s Timbers

Experts have felled 59 of the trees at the Villefermoy forest in the Seine-et-Marne region, and a further 26 oaks will be donated by four state-owned forests managed by the National Forestry Office. The massive restoration effort will need 1,000 French oak trees in total. - Artnet

This Gainsborough Portrait Of An Obscure Composer Sold For £2,500 (Could Be Worth £1 Million)

“Gainsborough had a great deal of interest in musicians and likened a picture to a piece of music, once writing: ‘One part of a Picture ought to be like the first part of a Tune; that you can guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the Tune, and so I’ve done.’” - The Guardian

An Entire 3,000-Year-Old City Has Been Uncovered In Egypt

Excavating in an area between large temples at Luxor, a team led by famed archaeologist Zahi Hawass found the ruins of an entire working city — administrative offices, residences, a bakery, and so on, all the rooms containing everyday objects — from the reign of Amenhotep III. The discovery is being likened to those of Tutankhamun's tomb and Pompeii....

This $1,780 Painting May Actually Be A Caravaggio

The 44"-by-34" depiction of Christ with the crown of thorns was thought to be by José de Ribera, a minor 17th-century Spanish artist, and had been slated for auction in Madrid with an expected value of about €1,500. Then curators at the Prado declared that there's "sufficient stylistic and documentary evidence" to believe it might be Caravaggio's work, and...

Prices For NFTs Swoon (Collapse?)

Perhaps, according to recent figures published by Nonfungible.com, which show that the average price of NFTs plummeted almost 70% from a peak of around $4,000 in mid-February to around $1,400 earlier this week. Since Bloomberg first reported the price crash on 3 April, sales have continued to decline. - The Art Newspaper

Why Wouldn’t Saudi Arabia Lend ‘Salvator Mundi’ To The Louvre? Spite, Basically

History's most expensive artwork, purchased by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2017 for $450 million, was supposed to be part of the Louvre's blockbuster Leonardo da Vinci exhibition in 2019 and then go on long-term loan to the new Louvre Abu Dhabi. But Salvator Mundi hasn't been seen in public since its auction (and is rumored to...

Arkansas’s Crystal Bridges Anounces A Fifty Percent Expansion

The expansion would add nearly 100,000 sq. ft to the museum's current 200,000 sq. ft pavilion complex, which features concrete walls, bands of red cedar and copper roofs that all react to light and moisture in a forested Ozark setting. - The Art Newspaper

Hong Kong’s New M+ Wants To Be One Of The World’s Great Contemporary Art Museums. Politics May Make That Impossible.

"The has set M+ the target of being the first museum of its kind in Asia and to be ranked among the top five museums in the world for visual culture. … To achieve such lofty ambitions, M+ needs international credibility. But given growing ideological tensions between China and the West, it is going to be hard for...

Enormous Golden Modernist Mobile Removed From Lincoln Center Will Be Installed At LaGuardia Airport

There was a minor uproar in December when Lincoln Center announced that Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo, which had dangled in the multi-story upper atrium of Philharmonic Avery Fisher David Geffen Hall since the 1960s, had been removed as part of the venue's renovation and would not be returning. Following a suggestion by former New York Times and New...

Art At Scale: Putting All Of The UK’s National Collections Online

Art UK brings together over 3,000 public collections on one shared, economically efficient platform, allowing them all to reap the benefits of scale and technology in one of the largest arts partnerships put together in the UK. Art UK's Partner Collections have access to the Art UK Shop, enabling them to generate income without making any capital investment or...

Bayeux Tapestry May Be Too Damaged To Travel To UK

There was quite some excitement in January of 2018 when President Emmanuel Macron announced that the 950-year-old, 2,300-foot-long needlework depicting the Norman Conquest would be lent to Great Britain in 2023, when its home museum would be closed for renovation. But a report following examination of the Tapestry finds that (as curators warned when the loan was announced) the...

Suspect Arrested For Theft Of Van Gogh And Hals Paintings In Netherlands

"The police announced on Tuesday morning that they had arrested a 58-year-old man on suspicion of stealing both Vincent Van Gogh's The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884) and Frans Hals's Two Laughing Boys with a Mug of Beer from two museums in the Netherlands." The thefts occurred last year in March and August, respectively, from museums that...

Venice Passes New Rules Restricting Biennale Business — Will They Help Or Hurt?

It may be a hasty measure in which practical consequences have not been thought through, or it may, as some suggest, be an indirect boost to the ­Biennale, which looks with some suspicion upon those who want to ride its jet stream by setting up ancillary exhibitions in the city. - The Art Newspaper

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');