Category: visual

Wags had taken to calling the Met the Necropolitan and said it suffered from hardening of the galleries. The New Yorker sniped that the acting director still wrote with a quill pen and considered theories about the democracy of art to be “so much parlor Socialism.” Moses disdained the old families who’d run the place since its founding. – The Daily Beast

“As I rose through the ranks, people would ask me, ‘Did the art background and training have an effect?’ There is something to that. By training in the art field, your brain tends to adapt and see things in a way people might not see.” – Artsy

The issue is that the exterior of the 12th-century structure was under renovation when the fire broke out on April 15, and 50,000 tubes of scaffolding that were in place at the time are still there. With the now-destroyed roof no longer helping hold the walls in place, removing the scaffolding will be a difficult, dangerous process. – AP

“Christ Mocked, by the 13th-century Florentine painter Cimabue, had hung for decades above a cooking hotplate in the kitchen of a 1960s house near Compiègne, north of Paris, before it was spotted by an auctioneer who had come to value furniture for a house move. But after the unsigned work was bought at auction in October by US-based private collectors, the French state this week classified the painting as a ‘national treasure’ and refused it an export certificate. The move gives the French state 30 months to attempt to find [€24 million in] funding to acquire the picture itself.” – The Guardian

“You can never be comprehensive in some absolute way. So, in a way, we’ve gone in the opposite direction and decided we’re not even going to attempt to do that. Instead, we are going to engage again and again and again. The way we are looking at it is that, rather than thinking of this display—which sprawls across almost 170,000 square feet and consists of almost 2,500 works of art—as somehow permanent or even quasi-permanent, we think of it as a point in time that over a two-to-three-year period will virtually entirely change again.” – Artnet

Overreaction is crucial: the work must prompt commentators to proclaim the end of art, to evoke the cliché of the emperor’s new clothes. – The Art Newspaper

“The Welsh first minister has defended his government’s handling of the festive Banksy work Season’s Greetings, which is to be locked behind closed doors in a former police station after being briefly put on show to the public.” – The Guardian

“As dealers struggle to insure works of art bound for Hong Kong, where pro-democracy protestors continue to clash with police, Art Basel in Hong Kong organisers say they are working with a local insurance broker to offer cover — at 20 times the normal rate.” – The Art Newspaper

The issue of delayed wages has been a thorn in the side of arts workers for months – or years. While unionized workers have shut down several museums over it, this protest was organized by non-unionized workers. “Among the texts written on the placards held up by Villalba and his colleagues were ‘Exhibitions are always on time, why aren’t our payments?’ ‘NO to work without rights;’ and ‘The love of art should not mean unpaid work.'” – Hyperallergic