"I would like to reiterate the concept I have of archaeology not only as a study of beautiful objects or monuments but also of very ephemeral traces. The real discovery, in fact, was not the object itself but the landscape that has been transformed over the centuries. Today that landscape is still agricultural but in it we have found...
A shadowy art/activist collective calling itself White Lies Matter made a bit of a stir earlier this month when it stole a chair dedicated to the first and only president of the Confederate States from a cemetery in Selma, Alabama and threatened to turn it into a commode if their demands weren't met. Here's an explainer covering what exactly...
Last week several news outlets reported, based on a French TV documentary, that the world's most expensive artwork wasn't in the Louvre's big 2019 Leonardo show because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (reputedly the work's buyer) was angry that the Louvre's curators refused to guarantee that it was Leonardo's work. Now David D. Kirkpatrick and Elaine Sciolino report that...
“They have been equally unsafe in the hands of British, not least because of attack in 1897, which destroyed so much royal and sacred landscape,” said Dan Hicks, an archaeology professor at the University of Oxford in England who has written extensively on the Benin Bronzes. And, he added, many Benin Bronzes have headed to market in Europe, leaving...
Whiteread won the Turner Prize when she was 30, the first woman, and youngest artist, ever to win - and she id it for casting an entire house in London. She's been casting objects and the spaces around objects for three decades. But now? Now, she's building new things. - The Guardian (UK)
He (and Theo) had three. From reading a book that includes some newly translated letters, we can learn that "Lies was frustrated that women didn’t have more professional options that were socially acceptable. We learn about how Wil often copied Vincent’s drawings and was his favorite model, and that the two wrote to each other about art and...
Lucky statues! "Without themselves needing to organise, these historically neglected members of the inanimate community have within the last few months secured privileges, protections and high-level advocacy that, in addition to their existing plinth status, falls only narrowly short of full suffrage – and even that cannot confidently be ruled out." - The Guardian (UK)
The monument, stolen (or "liberated," if you prefer) from a cemetery in Alabama, will now be returned to its former owners, United Daughters of the Confederacy. "'Everything about the South is painfully polite, even the racism, that is, until it’s not. We don’t have the luxury of being polite,' the activists said in a statement. 'We aren’t doing this...
Art museums sometimes have difficulties responding to the current moment, by design. A new show in Louisville might change some of that. "Conventional encyclopedic museums like the Speed, the largest and oldest art museum in Kentucky, are glacial machines. Their major exhibitions are usually years in the planning. Borrowing objects from other museums can be a red tape tangle."...
The art fest was planned for February, then July, and at locations all over the city (supposedly to promote social distancing). But as July get closer, organizers decided to move it once again - to an online-only location, and to try a 2022 restart in real life. Pandemic uncertainty strikes again. - Los Angeles Times
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
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...
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
“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
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....
