And shows, where a Dreamworks show took honors. Repeating this year as most-trafficked museum is the Louvre in Paris, which welcomed 9.6 million visitors, easily beating No. 2, the National Museum in Beijing. – The Art Newspaper
Category: visual
Six-Year-Old Thrown Off Tate Modern Balcony Last Summer Can Sit Up And Speak
“The French tourist, who was visiting London with his parents, was pushed from the gallery’s 10th floor viewing platform by a teenager with a history of mental health problems. … The boy has now gained the ability to sit up on his own, and he is able to feed himself soft foods with his right hand. He is still working on the coordination of his left side but is making small advances.” – Artnet
What’s Missing While Looking At Art Online
It is increasingly common for people to buy art, like everything else, online. So online presence is obviously vital. Perhaps the Covid-19 emergency, while directing attention onto the virtual world, will also indicate its limitations. It has been argued by several commentators that, rather than bringing people together, digital technologies and social media contribute to the creation of a generation of disengaged narcissists under the spell of surveillance capitalism. Other people, places and things are reduced to the status of props in a theatre of selfhood. Yet it seems a little unlikely that the person who checks out galleries online fits that profile. – Irish Times
‘We Are All Edward Hopper Paintings Now’
Jonathan Jones: “If [the widely-shared tweet is true], a crisis of loneliness is impending that may be one of the most fraught social consequences of COVID-19. The loss of direct human contact we’re agreeing to may be catastrophic. This, at least, is what Hopper shows us.” – The Guardian
No, We Are Not All Edward Hopper Paintings Now
Alex Greenberger: “[There’s] a difference between Hopper’s forlorn subjects and so many of us right now. They choose to live in modernity and find themselves alienated because of it. We choose to simply try to stay alive in the world today and a pandemic that has so far killed more than 36,000 worldwide is keeping us captive.” – ARTnews
Met Museum Will Provide Another Month’s Pay To Laid-Off Staff
With its building closed indefinitely due to the coronavirus pandemic, the museum’s administration let go most of its employees with a promise to pay them only through April 4; that promise has now been extended to May 4. – The New York Times
Thieves Steal Van Gogh From Museum Closed Because Of Virus
The Singer Laren museum, just outside the Dutch capital city of Amsterdam, said van Gogh’s “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring” was stolen in an overnight raid. The painting — created in 1884 by the Dutch master, according to Reuters — was on loan from another Dutch institution, the Groninger Museum in the city of Groningen. – CNN
Memes Belong In Museums
Think about the doge meme, for instance. “This meme is iconic, woah heritage, such icon.” (But for real: Memes show the power of photography and creativity, and the top memes deserve to be archived.) – BBC
Who Gets The Credit – And Money – For An Artist’s Quick Rise?
A lesson in not making desperate promises, perhaps: “When Derek Fordjour was a little-known art student at Hunter College, before Michael Ovitz and Beyoncé began collecting his work, before his paintings came to sell for more than $100,000, the fledgling artist struck a deal with a New York gallery. He agreed, according to a lawsuit now being pursued in New York Supreme Court, to produce 20 works for $20,000.” Now the gallery says he owes 7 paintings – or $1.45 million. – The New York Times
How Can Visual Artists Survive?
Museums are silent, and the Tate Modern’s 20th anniversary celebration has gone mute. But the small galleries and artists of Britain are in much more dire circumstances. Says one close observer, “We might lose the really interesting emergent art, the stuff of the future, if we are not careful.” – The Observer (UK)