"On closer inspection, there is an asymmetric battle between a grassroots struggle to redistribute power, and those who place institutional preservation at the center. Ironically, Trump, by dint of his very nastiness, gave the upper hand to institutional preservationists, and not just by threats to defund sanctuary cities, which cast institutions as victims." - Hyperallergic
"The world's most visited museum — a record 10 million in 2019, mostly from overseas — is grappling with its longest closure since World War II, as pandemic restrictions keep its treasures under lock and key. But without crowds that can swell to as many as 40,000 people a day, museum officials are seizing a golden opportunity to finesse...
"'We no longer have a choice, the building is in distress,' Centre Pompidou president Serge Lasvignes told Le Figaro of the extensive upkeep needed for its Renzo Piano- and Richard Rogers-designed exterior of steel piping that was constructed in the 1970s." The museum will close for the €200 million project at the end of 2023 and should reopen in...
"The pandemic will have caused frustration to students everywhere and it must have been difficult for university authorities to react to the ever-shifting situation. However, this last year has highlighted the extent to which universities are now dependent upon the money generated by the numbers of students they have, and the willingness of those students to go into debt,...
"I would like to officially state that I’m thrilled that the museum has collected art by women, in 2020 and in any other year, and the selections named in the press release are fantastic additions. However, I am confused about how the museum defines “diversifying a collection,” why they didn’t collect a lot more art by women at lower...
The artists of the Place du Tetre are feeling squeezed out by restaurants, and then there's the emptiness. One of the artists: "It’s a hard time for everyone, but it’s especially depressing here. ... Usually, this place is better than a studio because you are in contact with people from all over the place and that’s the pleasure. But...
The designer of the exhibit: "Duke Kahanamoku, on a wooden board with no fins, surfed a wave that was over 25 feet tall on its face. And he surfed it for over a mile. And we wanted to have the audience experience that moment. So we built a 27-foot tall wave and put a replica of Duke's board in...
Online drawing classes are, for many people in lockdown in Britain, a lifeline to the outside world. And there's a plus: "Individual sessions can attract hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people, and moving everything online has made life drawing more accessible to a diverse crowd." - The Observer (UK)
Because we can't trust the art world to the elites. For instance, in recent years, "Major art collectors (mostly white) were benefitting from the Trump deregulation and tax cuts, while investing some of their surplus wealth into the rebranding opportunity offered by the anti-Trump resistance. They could literally turn a profit on fulfilling the activist demand." - Hyperallergic
The chair, Pam Rorke Levy, says that despite controversy over the attempted sale of a Diego Rivera mural, among other things, "she has acted to save the school and that she was taking necessary steps in keeping one of the last remaining colleges on the West Coast exclusively dedicated to contemporary art in operation." - The New York Times
And, because of social media and marketing, it's making a serious comeback. The projects "are magnified again by technology, by the software that enables architects to visualise complex shapes and engineers to calculate them, by the photorealistic visualisation techniques that make a project seem physical before it is, by the construction techniques that turn these shapes into reality and,...
"The oil on canvas painting, named after the dog, a griffon called Minnay, is one of a series of eight dog paintings Manet produced between 1875-1883. The animal belonged to Marguerite, whose father was Gauthier Lathuille, the owner of a cabaret and later restaurant that featured in other Manet paintings." - The Guardian
"In another blow to Art Basel and its owner, MCH Group, the art fair's organizers have postponed its flagship edition in Switzerland for the second year straight due to the coronavirus pandemic. The Basel fair, which usually takes place in June, is now scheduled for September 23 through 26." - Artnet
“The paper trail for these art plunderers, as for most second-rank figures in Nazi Germany, largely dried up after their interrogations and de-Nazifications in the late 1940s,” Jonathan Petropoulos writes. “The oral history offered by Bruno Lohse and other old Nazis provided one of the few ways to reconstruct the postwar experiences of this cohort.” - The New York...
