Most of the statues are bad art in any case, with the Confederate ones intended to pave the way toward a white supremacist future. “Even if most of the hero statues remain standing, we should follow the pigeons: Desecrate them, at least. We must activate our skepticism about the ways dubious heroes are foisted on us. And we must build new kinds of memorials.” – Los Angeles Times
Category: visual
Louvre To Reopen With A Fraction Of Its Usual Visitors
When the museum reopens, 70 percent will be accessible, including the large galleries of French and Italian paintings, the sculpture courtyards and the Egyptian antiquities section. But with France’s borders still closed to travelers from outside the European Union, visitor numbers will be a fraction of what they usually are in the peak summer season. – New York Times
American Nursing Homes Have Been Exposed As A Design Catastrophe
Even when there is no pandemic to worry about, most of these places have pared existence for the long-lived back to its grim essentials. These are places nobody would choose to die. More important, they are places nobody would choose to live. “People ask me, ‘After COVID, is anyone going to want to go into a nursing home ever again?’ The answer is: Nobody ever wanted to go to one.” – New York Magazine
Uffizi Gallery Becomes High Art’s Top TikTok Jester
Until just a few years ago, the august Florence museum “acted like the internet didn’t exist”: it didn’t even launch a website until 2015 and only got itself a Facebook page after the COVID lockdown started this past spring. At the end of April, in an effort to reach young people, the Uffizi opened a TikTok account and started posting inventively humorous videos incorporating art in its collection — for instance, Botticelli’s Medusa turning a coronavirus to stone. – The New York Times
Performance Reviews For Statues?
While some have suggested placing these statues in a museum or leaving them to deteriorate naturally, I propose another way: a statue of limitations, where towns and cities would hold a mass review of their monuments, say every 50 years. At that point, citizens would be tasked with deciding whether to maintain the memorials as they are, reimagine them, or remove them from the public square for good. – The Atlantic
A New Image Of The Loch Ness Monster (And The Long Culture That Surrounds It)
Nessie may be hiding, the monster’s faithful believers will think. Every time the scientists come, Nessie dives deeper and hides. She’s a diva. She’s the Garbo of the animal kingdom. She knows when to do her headline-grabbing cameos and when to disappear. – The Daily Beast
Cairo’s Bizarre Phantom Architecture
“So much of the city has been demolished before we’ve even discovered and documented it. It means that, despite the generations of development, Cairo is not a place where you can walk around and really feel history, or identify who did what when. It’s so muddled.” – The Guardian
Trendlines: 18 Trends Moving The Art World
In consultation with art world professionals—artists, dealers, curators, museum administrators—we identified dynamics and ideas on the horizon, some with trajectories tracing into the past, others more sudden in origination. – ARTnews
Five Arrested, Including Ex-Curator At Louvre, In Major Antiquities Trafficking Case
“The case concerns ‘the sale of hundreds of pieces for tens of millions of euros’, which were allegedly looted from Egypt, Syria and Yemen as well as zones in Libya under Islamic State control. The criminal investigation into gang fraud, concealment of stolen goods, and money laundering was launched [in France] in 2018.” – The Art Newspaper
Philadelphia Museum Of Art To Let Go More Than 20% Of Its Staff
“The [museum] is moving to cut more than 100 jobs from its staff through furloughs, voluntary departures, and possibly layoffs. The furloughs will go into effect July 6, museum officials told employees during a webinar meeting Wednesday morning. Some furloughed employees will be recalled as operations ramp up, [and a] buyout package will be offered to … employees in most museum departments.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer