Magnus is part of a wave of smartphone apps trying to catalog the physical world as a way of providing instantaneous information about songs or clothes or plants or paintings. First came Shazam, an app that allows users to record a few seconds of a song and instantly identifies it. Shazam’s wild success — it boasts more than a billion downloads and 20 million uses daily, and was purchased by Apple for a reported $400 million last year — has spawned endless imitations. There is Shazam for plants or Shazam for clothes and now, Shazam, for art. – The New York Times
Category: visual
How Conservators Keep Art Made With Day-Glo Pigments Glowing
A reporter visits Los Angeles County Museum of Art, conservator Kamila Korbela as she works on restoring Frank Stella’s enormous Bampur. The challenge: the hue that’s fading fastest is one of Day-Glo Color Corp.’s most chemically complex: Saturn Yellow. – Los Angeles Times
Defining What A Museum Is: More Than Collecting, An Ideology?
After a week of debate in Kyoto, and pushback ahead of the International Council for Museums’s annual conference in the historic Japanese city, delegates voted overwhelmingly against a contentious new definition that its critics argue is “too ideological.” – artnet
Drought Reveals Ancient Long-Hidden “Spanish Stonehenge”
This past summer, an extreme drought in the Extremadura area of Spain that caused the Valdecañas Reservoir’s water levels to plummet has revealed a series of megalithic stones. – artnet
Is This The Last Botticelli Left In Private Hands?
This portrait of a 15th-century Greek-Italian poet-soldier has, for the past dozen years, been on loan to the Prado from the Spanish collector Doña Helena Cambó de Guardans, who hopes to get $30 million for it (and hopes Spain will let it out of the country). – The Art Newspaper
Why Is A Looted Mayan Sculpture Going Up For Auction?
“The sculpture was almost certainly stolen in the early 1960s from the ancient Maya site. It passed through the inventory of a prominent Los Angeles gallery on its way to Paris. Its illicit history is no secret, yet the sale in France is scheduled to proceed in broad daylight.” – Los Angeles Times
Art Institute Of Chicago Plans Major Long-Term Makeover Of Its Campus
“For its first North American commission, the prize-winning firm Barozzi/Veiga … has begun formulating ideas aimed at making an inward-looking museum rooted in the 20th century more extroverted and modern via methods that could include adding new buildings, reconfiguring existing ones and rethinking the presentation of art within them.” – Chicago Tribune
Italy Might Keep Its Foreign-Born Museum Directors After All
“Now that a new coalition government has been formed, sidelining the right-wing nationalist League, Dario Franceschini, the center-left politician who was behind the hiring foreign experts in the first place, is back as culture minister—which means the museum directors might be able to keep their jobs after all. And with Franceschini back, the directors of Italy’s state museum may not lose the autonomy that allowed them to modernize as they saw fit, another reform that the previous culture minister had tried to reverse.” – artnet
Scientists Find Anomaly In Dead Sea Scrolls That Casts Doubts On Origin
“This inorganic layer that is really clearly visible on the Temple scroll surprised us and induced us to look more in detail how this scroll was prepared, and it turns out to be quite unique.” – The Guardian
The Agreed-Upon Definition Of Museum Will Not Be Changed — For Now
Following “profound and healthy debate” at its Extraordinary General Assembly, the International Council of Museums postponed indefinitely a vote on whether to adopt a new definition of museums as “democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures … aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing.” – Time