Category: visual

“Elsewhere around the world, art galleries and museums remain shuttered, hemorrhaging staff and plaintively asking, What will it take to reopen? And just as crucially, What will this new art world look like? Seoul, a dense metropolis with a population of nearly 10 million but only two coronavirus deaths to date, is offering one possible answer.” – The New York Times

What does it mean to be an artist in an economy that actually doesn’t allow many people to make their living as artists? The art world is in the midst of a larger inflection point at the moment, as it increasingly recognizes itself as yet another industry built on hoarded capital and exploited labor. – The New Republic

This footage from 1929 and 1930 of the building’s construction – including the placement of an iconic 61st-floor Art Deco eagle – showcases how these workers were less comfortable delivering canned lines for the cameras than they were sitting atop beams hundreds of feet high. – Aeon

That is, until its Buddhist monk owner developed dementia and decided to let his collection go. – The Observer (UK)

The staff want to more info, and they want to see more sacrifices from the folks at the top. “Although the federal loan received by the museum may offer some relief, SFMOMA’s workers continue to ask the questions that have resounded across the cultural sector for weeks: why, with such wealth, are museums choosing to leave staff in the lurch, many of whom held tenuous positions to begin with? And why aren’t their wealthy benefactors, to whom a handful of millions represents a minimal fraction of their assets, help sustain them?” – Hyperallergic

Serge Alain Nitegeka can’t travel even when there’s not a global pandemic: He lives in South Africa, but he was born in Rwanda, and his family fled during the massacres in 1994. So for an exhibition in New York, “he relied on the gallery team to gather New York dirt, which turned out darker and mulchier than the reddish soil Mr. Nitegeka had pictured. That was fine — adaptation was the point of the piece. But the more tactile and sensory these decisions, the more the distance frustrated him.” – The New York Times

A Facebook group started in Moscow now has tens of thousands of members worldwide, making art of the mundanities of lockdown. “They have been posting their work at a clip of more than 1,000 items a day, each time attaching their own photo alongside an image of the original art. They have corralled family members, pets and household items to channel the iconic and, as the Munchs and Kahlos pile up, so do the obscure — a flexible air-conditioning duct; a collage of plastic forks; a ring of strung-together, almost-spent toilet paper rolls.” – The New York Times

ICA Watershed in East Boston is closed, of course – but then the staff of the ICA learned that East Boston had one of the area’s highest rates of Covid-19 infection and that the people of the area were in some serious need. They organized their regular caterers and a lot of donors to use Watershed as a launching site for boxes of produce and dairy. “‘We know this is just a drop in the bucket of need,’ said ICA director Jill Medvedow. … ‘It is wonderful to use the Watershed as a distribution place for food and to understand the many ways the arts can be in service to our community.'” – Boston Globe

“The robber, who arrived to the [Singer Laren] museum [near Amsterdam] on a motorcycle, broke in by smashing reinforced glass doors with a sledgehammer. Leaving the scene, the thief took Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring (1884), carrying the painting under his right arm.” – Artnet

Sure, the machers of the banking industry have deep roots in the art market—the Medicis fueled the Renaissance, the bankers of the East India Company let Rembrandt put up his paintings as loan collateral, and the robber barons used their money to build the Frick and the Morgan. But today, bankers don’t just want to be patrons—they want to be players, occupying roles once filled by art experts. – Artnet