“Suddenly he was in a drab, dehumanizing place, first a stable in California, then the barracks of Topaz, Utah, where he spent most of his time in internment. It was bleak, hot, arid and dusty, and he missed green things, trees and gardens. He moved quickly to establish an art school, both at Tanforan and later Topaz. And when he represented the camp at Topaz, the sense of displacement became dreamlike, even surreal, a luminous landscape that looked just a bit scorched, with a few dark buildings in the midground standing in for the enormity of what was happening there.” – Washington Post
Category: visual
Why AI Can’t Predict The Value Of Art
To bring real value, any A.I. application needs loads of quality data—which is doubly problematic in our small and notoriously opaque industry (dealers l-o-v-e to hoard sales info). Without greater transparency, A.I. can do only so much. – Artnet
Give This Woman A Pritzker Prize! Once Pakistan’s Starchitect, She Now Designs Mud-And-Bamboo Huts For Poor Villagers
Yasmeen Lari retired at 60 after making her career designing some of Pakistan’s glitziest modern buildings for government and corporate clients. Then, after a severe earthquake, she went to help with reconstruction — designing simple houses that survivors could build themselves, using the debris, that cost a tenth of what NGOs spent on prefab concrete homes. And she’s gone on from there, developing one innovative and inexpensive structure after another, creating jobs for impoverished women at the same time. – The Guardian
Museum Will Become Temporary Morgue As Ireland Braces For Coronavirus Deaths
“The Irish Museum of Modern Art … announced last week that it had been ‘requested to facilitate the construction of a temporary mortuary’ on its grounds as the ‘country prepares Public Health facilities to deal with Covid-19’.” – The Art Newspaper
How LACMA’s New Building Became A Referendum On Museums
How did this building, initially embraced as promising, if not visionary, come to ignite a scorched-earth debate in its final stages? The story of LACMA’s campus reconstruction—and the current opposition to it—reflects some of the thorniest questions at play in the operation of museums today: what they are meant to be, who gets to decide, and who is meant to pay for them. – Artnet
Can Looking At Art Online Beat The In-Person Experience?
“It’s definitely less trouble. You can stroll around the masterpieces at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, while seated at home in front of your laptop. Naturally, it’s far less crowded that way than it would be in reality. In other respects, though, the process is almost the same. You can select a Vermeer or a Frans Hals, and move in to examine it close up, read the information, move back — and, if you want, listen to a rather noisy narrated analysis of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’.” – The Spectator
Ancient Egyptian Pigment Has Become Biomedical Research Tool
“A researcher at the University of Göttingen, Sebastian Kruss, has used [Egyptian Blue], which is also known as calcium copper silicate, to produce a new nanomaterial that improves infrared spectroscopic and microscopic imaging.” – Artnet
When COVID Shut This Small Museum Down, Its Community Suffered A Big Loss
“In the eight years since it was founded, the Underground Museum has become not only one of the most important destinations for black art in the country but also a crucial gathering place for its working class Arlington Heights neighborhood [in Los Angeles]. … As cultural institutions all over the world wrestle with how to bring art to the public during the pandemic, smaller ones like the Underground Museum are also trying to figure out how to continue serving communities that have come to rely on them in other ways.” – The New York Times
Will LACMA’s New Building Free It Or Destroy It?
The debate here echoes similar ones going on throughout the art world. What is the purpose of the encyclopaedic museum: to present a rational version of the world in discrete categories, as they’ve functioned since the 19th century, or to challenge those hierarchies, taking into account the opening up of the canon that is taking place? – Apollo
Jerry Saltz Obsesses On Bruegel’s Vast Vista Of Mass Death
“This is Pieter Bruegel’s circa 1562 world-masterpiece painting The Triumph of Death, a panoramic pandemonium of an army of skeletons laying waste to a barren burning landscape while murdering every human being in sight. Lately, I have spent so much time contemplating this painting, I feel I have almost been living inside it.” – New York Magazine