Category: visual

“Museum exhibitions take an exceptional amount of planning — from curatorial conception to filling out loan forms and insurance, to shipping, hanging, and displaying works. Getting a show on a museum’s calendar is no simple feat, let alone getting it on the gallery walls. So what happens when a global pandemic puts exhibitions and their scheduling on an indefinite pause?” – Artsy

Younger, digitally minded collectors are predictably more receptive to online purchases, albeit at relatively low price levels. By contrast, more experienced collectors, conscious of possible condition and provenance issues, remain wary — and it is their spending that makes the art world go around. – The New York Times

If you’re not worried about Covid-19, now may be the time to visit Rome and the Vatican, where the museums have a limited number of people allowed per hour and many other coronavirus precautions. One Italian reporter in the Vatican Museums: “I decided to come because there are no Americans or other tourists. I hope the pandemic never happens again, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” – NPR

Who are the great writers of Spain’s Golden Age? Well, they’re men, of course … or, wait a second, we’ve been missing a whole bunch of information. “Recognition of these women and the ‘almost subversive’ fact of their writing is long overdue. Without them … we have an incomplete canon that tells only half the story of Spain’s Golden Age.” – The Observer (UK)

But many murals – like one to Eric Garner, who gasped out, “I can’t breathe” before he suffocated as an NYPD officer held him in a chokehold in 2014 – get painted over or destroyed. “When they are first painted, murals can act as ad hoc altars for public mourning. But their existence is often fleeting.” – The New York Times

New lidar technology revealed the formerly hidden, at least from the ground, site. The “lidar survey found 21 other monumental platforms, clustered in groups around the region. But Aguada Fenix is by far the largest—in fact, it’s the largest single Maya structure archaeologists have ever found. It took between 3.2 million and 4.3 million cubic meters (113 million to 151 million cubic feet) of clay and soil to build up the platform. That’s a larger volume than the famous pyramids built centuries later during what’s known as the Maya Classic Period. It’s also much older than any other Maya monument, old enough to suggest that the Maya started working together on huge construction projects much earlier than modern archaeologists had suspected until now.” – Ars Technica

In a sign that the lockdown really is loosening up, and perhaps that art can’t be stopped, “anyone wandering along a quiet street in central Seville at 8:30pm on Saturday would have witnessed the odd sight of a 17th-century Dutch governor wearing a Covid-19 mask as he once again handed over his city to Spanish forces.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Black Death “was the most devastating incident in human history. It altered not only human society but the imagination itself. Its traces can be perceived today, and perhaps more lucidly during these difficult days.” – The Guardian (UK)

And the museum’s new director will have to decide what to return to the former colonies, as well as giving the museum a new direction. (One might wonder why these tasks are given to “the first director of indigenous descent to lead a major French museum,” if one were thinking about structural racism.) – The New York Times