Tag: 04.23.00

Only a few days after the Louvre opened its new collection of primitive art to the public, experts are saying that some of the pieces were almost certainly stolen. – The Observer (UK)

Last week the Guggenheim showed off Frank Gehry’s models for a new extravagant museum in lower Manhattan. But the distinctive architecture faces fierce opposition from those who feel its radical style would mar an image of New York that “has been immortalised in thousands of movies.” There is also a competing plan for the land – from a hotel and casino developer. Some on Wall Street are also concerned about “the idea of thousands of tourists invading the financial district.” – BBC

Being sure about the provenance of a work of art isn’t such an easy matter, as the recent Nazi stolen art lists have shown. When did we start to care about the history of a painting? “I think it entered the written history of art probably at the time that people started collecting art as something that one appreciates rather than something one has for its function. It’s really when there was a shift over from stuff that you accumulated because it was a part of your life, religious devotion or practice to things you appreciated for their own sake. And that, I guess, happened about 1500.” – Chicago Tribune

“The greatest concentration of contemporary British art anywhere in the world is to be found in 50,000 square metres of an east London warehouse. Momart is where private collections are put out to pasture, where works that are too big, too precious, too fragile or simply supernumerary to their owners’ homes are discreetly tended by expert staff. This is where the totems of Sensation go when they are not on global tour – the waxworks, the mannequins, the ageing shark.” – The Observer (UK)

The recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel has been described as the most important art event of the 20th century. Because the uncleaned art had looked so dark and forbidding, we believed Michelangelo’s vision to be dark and forbidding. “And we came to believe that this darkness was synonymous with true creativity. In my mind, there is no doubt that the legend of the Sistine ceiling contributed mightily to the facile fantasy of the tormented genius: to the falsehood that an artist who was not in pain was not a real artist. The profound cost of five centuries of smoke and soot darkening the Sistine surfaces turns out not to have been in damage done to the frescoes themselves – underneath the charcoal haze they were wonderfully well preserved – but in the serious warping of our image of genius.” – The Sunday Times (UK)

August Wilson on his personal odyssey through African American history in his plays: “Before I am anything, a man or a playwright, I am an African-American. The tributary streams of culture, history and experience have provided me with the materials out of which I make my art. As an African-American playwright, I have many forebears who have pioneered and hacked out of the underbrush an aesthetic that embraced and elevated the cultural values of black Americans to a level equal to those of their European counterparts.” – New York Times

The Museum of Modern Art has been interpreting modern art throughout its history. Now a new series of shows reinterprets those interpretations. “In a sense, the museum is looking back at its own history and concluding that, while the term modernism might have seemed self-evident in 1929, when the museum was founded, it means something very different today.” – Philadelphia Inquirer

Few ordinary citizens get to visit their country’s embassies around the world. The artwork on display in those embassies represents home culture to the international diplomats who come calling. “If you don’t agree on trade issues or you argue about oil, at least you can talk about the art. It puts another face on us and provides information about who we are.” Now an attempt to collect important artworks for American embassies abroad. – Los Angeles Times