Category: visual

What does it say about us and our point in art history that Norman Rockwell is getting some positive critical attention? The Idler

Twenty-one years ago thieves broke into a San Francisco museum and made off with four paintings – including one thought to have been painted by Rembrandt. Now three of the works have mysteriously turned up.  New York Times

The top of the art market auctions has bloomed. But it’s the middle range where the really interesting action is.  Artnet.com

Antique dealers and auction houses have always had a complicated relationship. Now, one of London’s grandest names in Oriental art decides to sell off its Japanese collection – at auction.  Financial Times

But popular culture – the raw, vulgar, greasily commercialized stuff disdained by artistic traditionalists and modernists alike. LA curator puts pop into traditional art spaces. His specialty is not public art, not political or gender-driven art, not multicultural art — often, it’s not even contemporary art — but pop culture and its “artifacts” as art.  New Times LA

A new New York show takes a look at visual art in Berlin in the decade since the wall fell. And there’s not a painting in sight.  New York Times

To show Austrian and German fine and decorative art from first half of the 20th Century. Has prestigious 5th Ave. New York address and blue-chip founders. New York Times

In the past few months in South Central Los Angeles someone has been defacing community murals depicting the Virgen de Guadalupe. Art critics? fanatics? vandals?  LA Weekly

When artists invade construction of sports stadiums, the “public” in public art is challenged. New stadia are working out complicated relationships with public artists.  FoxSportsbiz.com

Picasso’s “Nude on a Black Armchair,” which he painted in one day, sold at auction for $45 million in New York. The art market roars back to life.  New York Times