“We weren’t looking to create the world’s blackest material, “says the founder of Surrey Nanosystems, which introduces Vantablack in 2014. “That wasn’t our thing. We were trying to solve a calibration problem for space instruments using carbon nanotubes.” And five years later, an even darker black was developed, absorbing 99.995% of all light that strikes it. Vivian Le explains how these materials were developed, why they aren’t pigments, and the reason everyone got mad at sculptor Anish Kapoor. (podcast plus text; includes video) – 99% Invisible
Category: visual
Smithsonian’s Hoped-For London Outpost Cut Back To A Two-Year V&A Show
The original plan, announced in 2015, was for a Smithsonian museum in the planned Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park; by the next year, it had been reduced to a partnership with London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, and in 2018 an agreement was signed for a permanent presence at the V&A East in the QEOP. Now the Smithsonian’s new chief, Lonnie Bunch, has decided downgraded that permanence to a two-year co-curated exhibition when the V&A East opens in 2023. – The Washington Post
America’s New Space Force Logo Seems To Have Been Modeled On Star Trek
The striking resemblance left many critics as stunned as though they had been zapped by Captain Kirk’s phaser. But others online insisted the logo was really based on the US Air Force One. – BBC
A History Of The Evolution Of MoMA’s Homes
This new MOMA is exhausting—and serene, and thrilling, and, finally, to a degree that only the greatest museums achieve, transcendental. Wandering the vast new spaces, tracing the familiar chronology of modernism through hushed, looming galleries built to a Louvre-like scale, following its sinewy path through sliding-glass portals and brushed-steel apertures that give seamlessly from Pelli to Taniguchi to DS+R (and Nouvel, thanks to the interthreading of the buildings), a visitor is overwhelmed by the grace and passion and precision of the art, new and old, canonical and obscure, fleeting and immortal. – The New Yorker
Australia Must Change Its Laws To Protect Aboriginal Artists From Artistic Carpetbagging
The Indigenous Art Code, established in 2008, is a voluntary code “designed to protect artists by getting dealers to commit to treating them fairly and honestly. Sanctions can be imposed on dealer members who have acted unethically. But the code has no power to regulate private dealers who are not members. [The Minister for Indigenous Australians] said it was not working.” – The Guardian (UK)
One Massive Problem With Blockbuster Art Shows
They create, sustain, and promote inequality – and a lack of public funding is increasing the issue. “The trend of putting on safer exhibitions by established artists to guarantee high visitor numbers and offset a decline in state funding could make it even harder for experimental and minority artists to break through.” – The Observer (UK)
A Fire Tears Through New York’s Museum Of Chinese In America, Destroying 85,000 Irreplaceable Works
In the heart of Chinatown, the collection was central to the history of Chinese Americans – and, because the building is structurally unsound, no one can go in to retrieve the water-soaked items to save at least some of them. “Among the thousands of items in the collection believed to be lost is a document from 1883 about the Chinese Exclusion Act. Other irreplaceable pieces included the carefully written letters of bachelors working in the United States to send money home ‘even though they didn’t live a full life because of discrimination,’ said Ms. Maasbach; traditional wedding dresses from the early 1900s known as cheongsam; items brought by emigrants in suitcases that in some instances were later left anonymously outside the museum’s front door; and photographs from Chinatown in the 1980s.” – The New York Times
How Can We Look At Monet While Our Planet Burns?
The Denver Art Museum has cast Monet as a sort of Romantic painter, looking for the truth in unalloyed nature – and perhaps finding it. But instead of demonstrating oneness with pure nature, “with a little critical re-framing, Monet’s most celebrated works can testify to the perniciousness at the heart of the structural conditions underlying today’s climate crisis — in particular, the dated binary between ‘enlightened’ humans and an inert and exploitable ‘true’ nature.” – Hyperallergic
There’s A Wave Of Forgeries Coming To The Print Market, Warn Art Experts
“Since the dawn of the internet, the problem of phony art being sold has only grown, experts say, and the primary coin of the forgery realm has long been the fake print, which is relatively easy to create, often difficult to detect and typically priced low enough to attract undiscriminating novice buyers. But now the problem seems to be escalating, according to law enforcement officials in the United States and Europe.” – The New York Times
Thomas Campbell’s Challenges At San Francisco’s Fine Arts Museums
It is not clear how Campbell will rebrand the museums, but he casts the de Young as a strong American arts institution and the Legion as a “treasure chest like the Frick, Kimbell or Neue Galerie, where we have an opportunity to double down on connoisseurship and scholarship of the European tradition with a nice vein of contemporary engagement spritzing things up”. – The Art Newspaper