“Opening in 2021 on the[National Museum of American History’s] first floor, the Molina Family Latino Gallery will feature bilingual exhibits exploring the history and contributions of American Latinos.” — Washington Post

Which country is this? On a per capita basis, Laos, on which the U.S. dropped 2 million tons of explosives between 1964 and 1973 in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese military supply lines. “A new generation of artists from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic are emerging, following decades of isolation in the orbit of the Soviet empire. The economy is growing rapidly, and the country is opening up.” — The Guardian

With a new announcement about gallery expansion seeming to hit the art-industry newswire every day, it can be vexing to try to visualize just how physically large even one major dealer is in 2018, let alone how that dealer compares to some of their closest peers. – Artnet

“The Castle was a jewel in its heyday, but it has been falling into disrepair for years and is now mainly an office building, providing space for about 200 employees. … Last year, there was an electrical fire; the year before that, stones fell off its exterior. And this fall, an outbreak of mold — not the first — forced the evacuation of more than 30 employees. … Meanwhile, the institution has focused on dozens of other projects at its 19 museums, research centers and zoo,” including several renovations and the building of two museums from scratch. — Washington Post

“Anish Kapoor reached an out-of-court settlement yesterday in a dispute with the National Rifle Association over its use of an image of his Chicago sculpture Cloud Gate (2004)” — aka “The Bean” — “in a promotional video. An agreement has been reached to remove the image from the video.” — The Art Newspaper

The need to assess sales tax is now dictated by what is known as an “economic nexus”, meaning that if a vendor’s sales reach a certain threshold (which varies by state), then it has enough of an economic presence there to justify the need to pay taxes. What could prove most problematic for dealers is that many states define the nexus differently. – The Art Newspaper

 

“The ruling by the Court of Cassation was handed down Monday after a long battle over the ancient Greek bronze, which was found by Italian fishermen off the Adriatic coast in 1964 and purchased by the Getty in the UK for almost $4m in 1977. The court was rejecting the Getty’s appeal of a ruling in June by a lower court in Pesaro stating that the statue must be returned.” — The Art Newspaper

Bridgit, “a series of short clips filmed on an iPhone featuring the Scottish countryside from a train window, a T-shirt on a radiator and a cat pawing at a lamp has helped Charlotte Prodger win the 2018 Turner prize. … The Glasgow-based artist has been making moving-image works for 20 years and is on many contemporary art radars, but she is far from being well known.” — The Guardian

What counts as a problematic work tends, loosely, to be anything explicitly sexually suggestive, some nudes, those with religious subject matter and politically engaged works that might be construed as criticising the Chinese regime. A foreign exhibitor at one of the fairs says anonymously that they were not allowed to bring a work that joked about global trade and Chinese manufacturing. Works by Georg Baselitz and Francis Bacon, proposed by international galleries were apparently among those turned down this year.

Last year, we heard that the Met had deficits. It pushed people out, cut its budget, and instituted a terrible $25 admission fee for tourists. I’m not given to amnesia, so I’m having a hard time squaring a need to reduce deficits, an unprecedented admission fee, a $70 million gallery redo, and that second baby behemoth, a $600 million new contemporary and modern wing. – National Review

“When you walk through an exhibition in New York’s Museum of Modern Art, every step you take is part of a deliberate design that takes you from piece to piece in just the right way. And it all starts with a dollhouse-like version of the gallery and teeny-tiny art replicas called ‘chips.’ In this episode [of Slate‘s podcast Working], Jordan Weissman talks to Lana Hum and Mack Cole-Edelsack, director and senior design manager, respectively, of MoMA’s exhibition design and production department.” (audio) — Slate

“Heading into their fourth and fifth decades, deep into midlife architectural crises, needing face-lifts, they’re now vulnerable and back again in the public eye, eliciting concern and attracting a second look — and sympathy — even from people who never liked them. But will these loved-hated structures be saved, and should they?” Joseph Giovannini considers the question. — New York Times

“The Mauritshuis museum in The Hague, which owns what is perhaps Vermeer’s best-known masterpiece, Girl With a Pearl Earring, has teamed up with Google Arts & Culture in Paris to build an augmented-reality app that creates a virtual museum featuring all of the artist’s works” — even The Concert, the Vermeer that was stolen in the 1990 robbery at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. — New York Times

Ron English, who bought Slave Labour for $730,000, said he was going to whitewash it to protest the idea that street art can be bought and sold. That didn’t work so well: “‘My phone has not stopped ringing,’ he said, listing off the various offers and ideas that he has since fielded. Whitewash the mural at my gallery, one person said. Charge admission, someone else suggested. Do it on pay-per-view, advised a third.”

Whoa: “Researchers preparing for an exhibition on Victorian attitudes to childhood, called Seen and Heard, have found that Connie Gilchrist, the forgotten young musician in painter Frederic Leighton’s canvas entitled *The Music Lesson, was once the toast of England and appeared in many Christmas pantomimes in the West End of London as well as in countless burlesque shows” – oh, and she ended up as the Countess of Orkney. Not bad for a child born in a horrific Victorian slum.

The painting, which sold at auction for £3.4 million, was the first one created in open air by the British artist. The arts minister: “It has so much significance for artistic and historical reasons that it is right that we do all we can to save this masterpiece for the benefit of the nation.”

The statue will be installed in 2020, and it’s the first in a planned series that came about after “the city’s reviews of its statues — an effort to toss out ‘symbols of hate’ — and the creation of She Built NYC, an initiative to create more statues of women.”

Afro-surrealist artist – and Ferguson documentarian – Damon Davis says, “We need to be able to imagine the world as we want to see it. … It can’t solely be based on anger because you’ll burn out.”

Or rather the art market in London that depends on Russian money: “New realities have restrained oligarchical excess. Over the past five years, the West has imposed a barrage of sanctions on Russia, including asset freezes and travel bans, tied to its incursions into Ukraine, interference in elections, and the attempted assassination of a former spy in Britain.” – The New York Times

“There is beauty here in exactly the way that Kant meant the word, a beauty that comes from the pleasure of looking at designs that ‘mean nothing on their own.’ … The problem is that … Aboriginal artists aren’t working with anything like a Kantian conception of a free play of the faculties and they have, in the vast majority of cases, no interest in the idea of abstraction as that idea emerged in … painting in the 20th century.”

“A final audit has revealed that the deficit caused by overspending in the 2017 edition of Documenta, the contemporary art exhibition that takes place in the German city of Kassel every five years, is more than €2m wider than originally calculated.” The total deficit on the event, €7.6 million, is attributed on overspending on Documenta’s extension to Athens.

Art is regarded as part of a wide aesthetic world, not sealed in a vacuum, so Robert Gober’s “Untitled Leg” spurs associations not just to Duchamp’s 1917 readymade urinal “Fountain,” Meret Oppenheim’s 1936 “Object” and Duane Hanson’s 1970s Madame Tussaud-like sculptures but also to an Alfred Hitchcock movie and Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West.

Consuming these images is stultifying. To be digitally femme means to bathe anxiously in the images of others and act impotently in response, liking a photo or congratulating others on their beauty. More stultifying is that this is done in spite of knowing the effort that went into each composition. The selfie is a cover-up, hiding both the means of its own production and the true self.

Because the idea of hip-hop architecture is still very new, the design elements aren’t quite apparent yet, though Deconstructivism and Postmodernism are probably the closest reference points in forms that emphasize the design of façades, different heights for different sections of buildings, and references classical architecture.