It’s not just description. “They started with the audio description of short films and then studied ways of translating the visual language of works of art into audio — including words, effects and music — and creating a mediation tool.” - El País
“Children respond instinctively to art. They have not built up defences, or preconceptions about it, and the earlier you take them to galleries and expose them to different styles and mediums, the more open and receptive they will be.” - The Guardian (UK)
The founding artists “could no longer sit ‘with their arms crossed and do nothing,’ about what they saw as a dire gap in their country’s art infrastructure, said Nu Barreto, the visual and plastic arts curator of the country’s first biennale.” - The New York Times
“Martine Gosselink, the director of the Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, whose collection includes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring …, said the turmoil had left her team wary of lending pieces to the US … amid the uncertainty wreaked by Donald Trump’s funding cuts and ideological impositions.” - The Guardian
This French museum’s show offers a flashback to the era when, apart from the works including those displayed here, the artists who created them were reviled and persecuted. - Los Angeles Times (MSN)
“The highly resistant mold covers objects in a white coating and has been detected in 12 museums, including the National Museum of Denmark and Skagens Museum. Known as aspergillus section restricti, it belongs to a group of fungi that can survive in extreme environments such as the deep ocean or near volcanoes.” - The Guardian
“It transformed, for better and worse, audience expectations at museums worldwide. … It taught curators to propound a global view of art — or perhaps no view at all. Its influence ripples through the rethought MoMA — but also the selfie stations of the Museum of Ice Cream.” - The New York Times
“The cuts will affect 20 full-time and nine part-time workers, and eliminate another 13 positions that were either vacant or would not be backfilled … as the museum grapples with low visitorship, loss of funding and a multimillion-dollar structural budget deficit.” - KQED (San Francisco)
The Piprahwa gems were discovered on the estate of an English landowner in India in 1898; they were inside reliquaries labeled as containing the cremains of Siddhartha Gautama himself. Sotheby’s was set to auction them in Hong Kong this week — until India demanded their repatriation and threatened lawsuits. - NBC News
Now it is in the cross-hairs of President Trump, who issued an executive order in March that seeks to address what he described as the Smithsonian’s promotion of “narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive,” singling out the African American museum as a particular offender. - The New York Times
The discussion offered a glimpse into the animated debate that the museum’s 45 curators have been engaged in over the last five years, reimagining how the institution should present art in its curvaceous, Peter Zumthor-designed building crossing Wilshire Boulevard. - The New York Times
“A powerful hailstorm breached the Louvre’s roof (on Saturday) afternoon, causing water to drip into the Salle Rosa room hosting its headline exhibition, ‘A New Look at Cimabue: At the Origins of Italian Painting.’ … (The water) narrowly missed Giovanni Cimabue’s unprotected Maestà wooden panel painting (circa 1280).” - ARTnews
“On April 28, a bankruptcy court ruled that the (Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma) will be sold for $1.4 million to McFarlin Building LLC. The 19-story property was to sell on May 6 in a bankruptcy auction, but despite its bankruptcy trustee approaching hundreds of potential buyers, no additional bids were submitted." - Artnet
A fellow painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, thought that “Turner’s pictures always look as if painted by a man who was born without hands” who had “contrived to tie a brush to the hook at the end of his wooden stump.” - New Statesman
“The discussion offered a glimpse into the animated debate that the museum’s 45 curators have been engaged in over the last five years, reimagining how the institution should present art in its curvaceous, Peter Zumthor-designed building crossing Wilshire Boulevard.” - The New York Times
