Category: visual

“In 2017, having realized how much business the gallery did through online previews before art fairs, the dealer David Zwirner decided to develop virtual viewing rooms. Now, as art fairs are canceled, museums close and auction houses consider whether to call off their spring sales in response to the coronavirus, Mr. Zwirner seems prescient.” – The New York Times

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Did you think the owner of Hobby Lobby paid too much for something that wasn’t authenticated so he could put it in his museum? You were correct. “Experts have confirmed what has long been suspected: the artifacts proudly displayed in the nation’s capital by the owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of stores are not part of one of the most significant archaeological finds of all time. They are worthless forgeries, probably made from old shoe leather.” – The Guardian (UK)

No one was injured in the theft, but what the heck is going on? “The loss of the paintings was a fresh blow to [Christ Church] college, which had already made headlines this weekend after it discovered that cases of burgundy and Pouilly-Fuissé worth between £1,000 and £2,000 have been mysteriously disappearing from its large fine wine collection.” – The Guardian (UK)

This 1915 monument to coal mining is going to live on, by luck (and a heritage fund). “The crowning glory was a spectacular debating chamber, nicknamed the pitman’s parliament, in which each numbered seat corresponded to a colliery. Deliberately designed to resemble a mine-owner’s country estate, Redhills was a unique and extraordinary monument to working-class pride, ambition and self-organisation.” – The Observer (UK)

Kana shodo, which is more than a millennium old and in which the first known novel was written, has fallen out of use for Japanese women today – but artist and master calligrapher Kaoru Akagawa is making art with it. – CNN

Meteorites are the hot new thing at Christy’s. The auction may (OK, probably will) be rescheduled over virus fears, but the fact remains that meteorites are becoming more popular to collectors, and the resource is finite. “Only about 60,000 meteorites are known to have landed on Earth, according to experts, but many fragmented into hundreds of pieces as they crashed through the atmosphere, or have since been cut and sliced and cut some more.” – The New York Times

Assembled between 2630 and 2611 B.C. in Saqqara, Egypt, the pyramid, where Djoser and 11 of his daughters were buried upon their deaths, contains roughly 11.6 million cubic feet of stone and clay. Looping through and around the burial chambers is a winding, maze-like network of tunnels that was likely designed to prevent theft but apparently weakened the building’s structural integrity. – Smithsonian

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, artists such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse turned to African art for new ideas about how to represent the world, creating figures with masklike faces, flattened forms and backgrounds of vibrant patterning. They weren’t just borrowing visual ideas, however. Many of them believed in a connection between what they saw as primitive culture and the deeper wellsprings of psychological life, a way to reference and represent urges and emotional drives that had been suppressed by “civilization.” But they also were appropriating wholesale the visual material of people who were suffering colonial oppression, taking sacred objects out of context and imputing to them European-derived ideas about their purpose and meaning. – Washington Post

“[The Palais de Lomé in Togo] is a remarkable achievement for one of the world’s poorest countries, where almost 70 percent of the rural population lives below the global poverty line. … The new museum is also an unexpected signal of cultural openness by the historically repressive Togolese government.” – Frieze