Category: visual

No, not all the art on the Playa goes up in flames. In fact, Burners face a real problem: how do they get these enormous sculptures out of the Black Rock Desert and what do they do with them afterward? Now one longtime Burner has provided an option in the desert just outside Las Vegas: Area15, where artworks from the festival are put on display and offered for sale. – Artnet

Teju Cole: “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. … I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.” – The New York Times Magazine

“If the monuments are going to be thrown out, chucked away, we’re happy to buy them and dismantle them and put them together back in Russia for future generations to enjoy and to appreciate. The idea is preserving those things for history. History has two sides of it always. Bad or good, it’s a piece of art.” – Washington Post

“The Musée Jacqueline et Pablo Picasso, which would have held some 1,000 paintings by the artist, fell through as a result of a failed negotiation between the French town’s city council and Jacqueline’s daughter and Picasso’s stepdaughter Catherine Hutin-Blay, who headed the project for the institution.” – ARTnews

“The local audience is really the central audience. It’s an audience that has grown up with the institution and comes to you again and again. They have a much closer connection because they enjoy and notice constant changes within the institution. Their level of expectation is higher,” than, for example, a tourist who comes once every few years. – Artnet

Mwazulu Diyabanza, the spokesman for a Pan-African movement that seeks reparations for colonialism, slavery and cultural expropriation, is set to stand trial in Paris on Sept. 30. Along with the four associates from the Quai Branly action, he will face a charge of attempted theft, in a case that is also likely to put France on the stand for its colonial track record and for holding so much of sub-Saharan Africa’s cultural heritage — 90,000 or so objects — in its museums. – The New York Times

“The Smithsonian Institution and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London are abandoning plans to jointly curate a gallery in the planned V&A East museum, slated to open in East London in 2023. The proposed gallery was expected to draw from both institutions’ permanent collections to explore the impact of human life on the natural world.” – Artnet

“The ongoing controversy at the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal has erupted into a legal battle as ousted director Nathalie Bondil sues her former employer for C$2 million ($1.5 million). Bondil’s complaint alleges that the museum board ‘orchestrated, led, and continues to lead an intentional campaign of defamation and destruction of her reputation.’ Bondil is seeking moral and punitive damages on the grounds of unfair dismissal and libel.” – Artnet

Alex Greenberger lays out the background and history: why Nathalie Bondil had been so acclaimed before she was fired; the new curator and accusations of nepotism; counter-accusations of bullying; what the museum’s board is saying (publicly) about the matter; what the employees are saying (which is rather different). – ARTnews