Category: visual

As the Civil War raged, Kentucky was officially neutral – but it was a slave state. Freedom lay just across the river in Indiana, says poet Hannah Drake, whose nonprofit is preparing to install a kind of monument to those who dreamt of escape. “The memorial will start as a path of cast or carved footprints. That will lead people from nearby history museums to the river, where there will be limestone benches. Then there will be more footprints leading to the river’s edge.” – NPR

The planned reopening date is September 9, but of course not if infections start to crest again in New York. And, of course, “when it reopens, it will limit capacity to 25% and reduce its operating days to five instead of seven.” Then there’s the little matter of paying what the museum wishes, not what you wish. – Hyperallergic

There are the familiar objects that suddenly seem to glow with importance – toilet paper rolls, Lysol wipes – and then there are the new objects: the to-go cocktail pouch, the ultra-large Burger King social distance crown, the virus piñata to hit and kill, and, of course, Black Lives Matter facemasks. – The New York Times

Born in Calais, France, Fabrice Fourmanoir, 63, might once have been dismissed as a crackpot, a wannabe who would never be welcomed into the sophisticated enclave of art scholarship. But since January he’s gained some standing in this forbidding world, after playing a leading role in a blush-inducing admission by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a reported $3 million to $5 million, is not actually by Gauguin. – Washington Post

Jason Farago: “Tokyo 2020, its name unchanged, will now take place in July 2021 if it takes place at all. Yet all around the Japanese capital is the legacy of another Olympics: the 1964 Summer Games, which crowned Tokyo’s 20-year transformation from a firebombed ruin to an ultramodern megalopolis.” – The New York Times

Kitsch is a conflicted term—hard to strictly define, but as with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s joke about pornography, one knows it when one sees it. For the purchasers of kitsch in nineteenth-century Munich, reproductions of elaborate and intricate decoration were a means of class ascension. But they also signaled a type of bourgeoisie cluelessness concerning taste, discretion, and style. – JSTOR

David Nash at the University of Brighton in the UK and his colleagues have identified the source of 50 of the 52 large boulders, known as sarsens, that make up the monument’s iconic stone circle. By analysing the stones’ chemical composition, the team has traced their origins to 25 kilometres away from the monument, in the West Woods in Wiltshire. – New Scientist

“The removal of a pair of concrete murals by Pablo Picasso was completed Tuesday from a government building in the Norwegian capital of Oslo whose demolition was under way.” (That building, called the Y block, was damaged in the 2011 bombing-and-murder spree by right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik.) “The total cost of the removal of the art pieces — to be preserved and installed elsewhere — and the demolition is estimated at 59 million kroner ($6.4 million).” – Yahoo! (AP)

The MOCAD board brought in outside counsel to investigate the allegations against Elysia Borowy-Reeder, who became director in 2013. In a release announcing her termination, the board said the investigation found that Borowy-Reeder’s “leadership fell short of its goals for diversity, inclusivity, and a healthy work environment.” – ARTnews