Category: visual

A spokeswoman for National Museums Liverpool defended its use of the enhanced surveillance technology as an additional security measure for the exhibition, titled “China’s First Emperor and the Terracotta Warriors,” which ran from February to the end of October last year. The technology was used on the advice of the local police and not at the request of the Chinese lenders, artnet News understands. – artnet

“On 12 August, 24 national branches [of ICOM] — including those of France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Canada and Russia, along with five museums’ international committees — requested the postponement of a vote on a revised definition of museums.” Said one veteran art journalist of the proposed revision, “At first, I thought this was a joke”; the chair of the International Committee of Museology maintains that not even the Louvre would qualify as a museum under the proposed revision. – The Art Newspaper

Charles Desmarais: “As important as the Arnautoff murals are, as art and as American history, the issues raised by the attempt to destroy or obscure them are larger than this single controversy. They have to do with what I think of as a kind of cultural duty of care — with the avoidance of negligence or harm to works of art maintained by an organization for the public good. – San Francisco Chronicle

Alvin Baltrop only had a few shows while he was alive, one of which was at a gay nightclub. Now that he’s getting more attention, we can see some of the “real” New York of the 1970s and 1980s – the impoverished city that couldn’t rebuild a collapsed West Side highway, the piers where the Whitney Museum now stands, the cruising that happened under those piers, the time between Stonewall and the AIDS crisis. (Oh, and they tell a lot of architectural history, too.) – The Guardian (UK)

Work stopped entirely on July 25 to ensure that tests were done and the workers were safe, because many tons of lead burned or melted when the spire fell in the fire in April. But work will resume Monday, and “after reassuring measurements on air quality, the debate focused on the concentration of lead on soils around Notre-Dame and in some schools on the left bank.” – Le Monde (France)

Bodies have changed – we’re bigger, with a lot more markings – and times have changed: It’s actually less legal to be nude on national beaches now than it was during the summer that saw both Woodstock and Altamont, though women can legally go topless now in a lot more states. – The New York Times

How long can this last? “This market brings together two groups who normally don’t socialize: critics and collectors. There are the exotic-seeming rich people, as any reader of Henry James would know well; once at dinner, asking one collector where he lived, I got a listing of his homes: the Park Avenue apartment, the ranch in Ireland, the winter place in Florida, and so on. Art dealers, too, are fascinating because they sell to collectors expensive artifacts that satisfy no immediate need.” – Hyperallergic

Whoops, forgetting (or neglecting to worry about) maintenance isn’t going to cut it anymore, or at least not in this case. “The five judges on a Roman court overseeing the use of public funds ruled on Aug. 6 that Santiago Calatrava, the Spanish-Swiss architect globally renowned for his sleek and elegantly curved designs, had committed ‘macroscopic negligence’ in constructing the glass-and-steel bridge that opened near Venice’s train station in 2008. They fined him 78,000 euros.” – The New York Times

Magdalene Odundo, a Kenya-born British ceramicist who hand-builds her work, says clay is a natural substance for creating bodies and other shapes. And no, she doesn’t find the word “craft” offensive – but: “Crafting work is a term that means you are making work, you are actually crafting a piece of work. There is nothing wrong in making craft; I actually think it’s a very apt word for making, but it’s not helpful when it classifies certain work as not being of equal status to art.” – The Observer (UK)