Well, it’s an idea, anyway, and far – far – from the worst idea Boris Johnson has proposed. “The devil, though, is in the detail, a territory that Boris Johnson finds notoriously hard to navigate.” – The Guardian (UK)
Category: visual
How The “Museum Of Ice Cream” Melted Down
From all indications, the Museum of Ice Cream is melting down. Spending was slashed in January. In March, Bunn temporarily closed the permanent installations in New York and San Francisco, and laid off around 200 workers. – Forbes
Turkey Might Really Turn Hagia Sophia Back Into A Mosque
The Byzantine emperor built it in the sixth century to be the flagship cathedral of Eastern (and perhaps all) Christianity. When the Ottoman sultan conquered Constantinople in 1453, he converted it into a landmark mosque. When Atatürk’s secular revolutionaries founded the modern Turkish republic, he made it a public museum honoring both faiths and their histories. But next week, a Turkish court will rule on whether President Erdoğan can make good on his longtime campaign promise to (as his justice minister puts it) “see its chains broken and opened for a prayer.” – Public Radio International
Here Are The Ten Artists Sharing What Would Have Been The Turner Prize
“Tate, the British museum network that facilitates it, reconstituted the prize in light of the coronavirus pandemic. In lieu of the main £25,000 ($32,200) award, 10 artists and collectives are taking home what are being called Turner Bursaries awards of £10,000 ($12,500). … Half of the winners this time are nonwhite, and as usual for the Turner Prize, which often skews toward conceptual art, most do not work in traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture.” – ARTnews
A Gallery Of Detroit’s Fabulous 20th Century Ruins
They’re grand spaces now in decay – which gives them altogether another kind of beauty. – The Guardian
Will The Art Gallery System As We Know It Survive?
There’s no reason why the art gallery as we know it, a 19th century invention, should last forever. But there’s also no sign of an alternative on the horizon. As with other small New York businesses that’ve been closed since mid-March, it’s not clear how many galleries will be able to hold out long enough to reopen. – The Nation
Natural History Museum’s Removal Of Roosevelt Statue Is A Good First Step
At a moment when the world’s museums are being called out for ingrained and unexamined inequalities, the American Museum of Natural History is one of the few to take decisive action. Art institutions, by contrast, have largely engaged in hollow gestures. – The New Yorker
Artist “Pirates” Ten Years Of Sotheby’s Data, Offers It As Art Online
Paolo Cirio scraped over 100,000 auction records from the past ten years of Sotheby’s sales and is now offering digital reproductions of the auction lots for 1/100,000th of the price they sold for. – Artnet
That Statue Of Teddy Roosevelt That’s Coming Down In New York? This Russian Collector Will Buy It
Andrei Filatov, a rail transport and investment magnate (who is also chairman of the Chess Federation of Russia), has offered to purchase the long-controversial statue in front of the American Museum of Natural History that depicts Theodore Roosevelt on horseback flanked by half-naked American Indian and African men on foot. He’d made a similar offer for a statue of Alexander Baranov, the Russian colonial governor of Alaska, in Sitka that activists want relocated. – The Art Newspaper
Has This Dealer Really Found A Long-Lost Frida Kahlo Painting? Probably Not
“Scholars in the work of surrealist Frida Kahlo have searched for more than six decades for The Wounded Table, a 1940 oil painting illuminating her pain over the breakup of her marriage to muralist Diego Rivera that hasn’t been seen since an exhibition in Poland. And the historians strongly reject the idea that the mystery of its whereabouts has been solved, as claimed by a Spanish art dealer who says the painting is now sitting in a London warehouse awaiting a buyer willing to spend more than 40 million euros.” – Yahoo! (AP)