Category: visual

“For the second time this year, the Tate is cutting jobs — 120 of them, or about 12 percent of the institution’s overall workforce. The staffing reduction comes as the museum faces an expected loss of £56 million ($75.3 million) in self-generated income due to closures for almost half of 2020.” Earlier this year, 295 staffers were made redundant across the Tate’s four branches in London, Liverpool, and Cornwall. – Artnet

The Artemio Franchi stadium, designed by Pier Luigi Nervi in 1930, is regularly featured in architecture textbooks and is even on a page in Italy’s passport. But the seats are uncomfortable, some of them are exposed to rain, and there’s no place for revenue-generating shops or eateries. The team’s owner, with the fans on his side, wants to tear it down and build a new one; preservationists are aghast; the culture ministry in Rome will be the referee. – The New York Times

Certainly, images of the Prophet of Islam have been far, far less common than those of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary and other Christian figures, and Muslim culture, especially in the Arab world, has tended to disapprove of pictures of any human or animal. Yet miniatures and manuscript illuminations featuring Muhammad did start appearing in the late Middle Ages in the Persianate world, and a calligraphic equivalent in Arabic was developed as well. – The Conversation

“The National Roman Museum recently received the piece of stone, which was inscribed in black marker, ‘To Sam, love Jess, Rome 2017.’ ‘I feel terrible for not only stealing this item from its rightful place, but writing on it,’ said the note accompanying the item. ‘It was a big mistake on my part and only now, as an adult, do I realize just how thoughtless and despicable it was.'” – Artnet

A long period of relative peace, prosperity, and globalisation after the Cold War had lulled the museum field into complacency not only about its financial viability, but also about its relevance and credibility. The Covid-19 crisis—which coincided with a painful reckoning with the intertwined legacies of colonialism and racial injustice—has accelerated a push to adapt and innovate, in six principal ways. – The Art Newspaper

“Once a thriving international trade hub, the archeological site of Hegra (also known as Mada’in Saleh) has been left practically undisturbed for almost 2,000 years. … Hegra was the second city of the Nabataean kingdom, but Hegra does much more than simply play second fiddle to Petra: it could hold the key to unlocking the secrets of an almost-forgotten ancient civilization.” – Smithsonian Magazine

Hailed as “the Sistine Chapel of the ancients”, archaeologists have found tens of thousands of paintings of animals and humans created up to 12,500 years ago across cliff faces that stretch across nearly eight miles in Colombia. – The Guardian

“The resurgence over the past two decades of artists working in the grand manner suggests that the energies inherent to this style didn’t disappear but were merely redirected: into cinema like that of Cecil B. DeMille; into cycles of narrative painting such as the African American history paintings of Jacob Lawrence; and even into political spectacle, lingering on in the rallies of President Trump. And now they are coalescing again into a coherent artistic form, with multiple offshoots and variations, including the works of Titus Kaphar and Kehinde Wiley.” – Washington Post

And, just as quickly as we all learned about it, the monolith in the Utah desert is gone. “The Bureau of Land Management said it would not be investigating the disappearance because ‘crimes involving private property’ are managed by the local sheriff’s office. The San Juan and Grand County Sheriff’s Offices did not immediately respond to requests for comment.” – The New York Times

It’s not just the sexualized, weirdly tiny Mary Wollstonecraft; it’s not just the naked Medusa in the park; it’s not just that rather iffy sculpture of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth all sitting down to plan universal suffrage. No. It’s the arc of public art for its entire history – and we do mean history in this case. “Two millennia of European and American history could be told through a genealogy of equestrian monuments to men, from Marcus Aurelius to Gattamelata, from Confederate generals to Kehinde Wiley’s exhilarating riposte, Rumors of War (2019). (And that’s just one genre!) One reason Wiley’s monument succeeds is that it has a heroic model to subvert. But women have no such models.” – Hyperallergic