Category: visual

“For 20 years, Fran Lebowitz has been dreaming of tourists disappearing from Times Square. ‘Now there are no tourists in Times Square,’ she recently said, ‘but, of course, there’s no one in Times Square.'” Since New York, like nature, abhors a vacuum, along came the artists. – The Guardian

The real tell is that in a statement he [Darren Walker] said that to mount the exhibition now would have been “tone deaf.” That’s the language of corporate image control. To many of the people who run our museums—not art people but bean counters—art is merely branding for the institution. – The Nation

A prominent figure within the New York art market, Sam Orlofsky had been one of the most visible leaders at Gagosian, where he recently helped launch a program known as its “Artist Spotlight” series, through which works by Damien Hirst, Jenny Saville, and more were sold for large sums of money online. – ARTnet

“Last year, an opaque selection process opened a rift between public officials and local artists when the city suddenly rejected [Maya] Thomas’s winning design. The reversal attempts to heal divisions. On Monday, the San Francisco Arts Commission unanimously voted to approve a previous recommendation made by a 2019 review panel for Ms. Thomas to design the luminary’s sculpture.” – The New York Times

“The Australian government has pledged A$10.1 million (about $7.2 million) in additional funds over four years toward the return Indigenous cultural heritage objects held in collections overseas.” – ARTnews

“Experts at the University Medical Centre Groningen conducted a psychiatric examination based on hundreds of letters he wrote – the majority to his beloved brother, Theo – as well as existing medical records. They found that the artist probably experienced two episodes of delirium caused by alcohol withdrawal after he cut off his own ear.” – BBC

“Drawing on satellite imagery, data analysis and on-the-ground reporting, the think tank [Australian Strategic Policy Institute] estimated that, since 2017, 65% of the [Xinjiang] region’s mosques and 58% of its important Islamic sites — including shrines (mazars) and cemeteries — have been either destroyed or damaged.” – The Art Newspaper

“If institutions had not already demonstrated their steely commitment to protecting power – how a museum director who depletes an endowment ends up at the helm of another museum, for instance, or how sexual harassment allegations against an administrator disappear as he moves from one post to another – it would seem that the institutional artworld was in a freefall from which it might not recover. Yet even if institutions do manage to survive, thanks to donors, endowments, and blind eyes, it has become clear that museum employees feel greater allegiance toward each other than to their employers.” – MOMUS

“Countries such as Belgium, Germany, and France have imposed new lockdowns and forced the closure of institutions for a month and, in some cases, potentially longer. Below, a look at some of the major institutions that have planned closures in response.” – ARTnews

“I would like to think of every Zoom grid not as the death of architecture, but at its proliferation into different spaces that are trying hard to recreate, at the microscale of the individual grid square, a world made possible by the architecture that it exposes: a glimpse of a bedroom here, a garden there, a living room, a bookshelf. The absence of architecture is equally ostensible when for example, an image of the landscape is projected behind the person on the screen. We yearn for the presence of architecture even in a fake background in order to transport us, through the architectural imaginary, to other worlds.” – ArchDaily