Arles is famous for Van Gogh and for its Roman ruins. Now there’s a new show in town: Luma. “The center doesn’t fit neatly into given ideas about museums, art collections or cultural hubs. … Luma doesn’t have a predictable program of exhibitions, artist residencies or performance pieces.” But it does have a Frank Gehry building, and a lot of aspirations. – The New York Times
The French Impressionists Had No Idea They Were Painting Masterpieces-To-Be
Of course they didn’t, even if some of them believed their work deserved that rating. “It’s easy to forget that for most of them at the time, their work was a risk – to create art in the way they felt was right, they needed to make personal and financial sacrifices.” – The Guardian (UK)
William Randolph Hearst Bought A Medieval Spanish Monastery And Shipped It To California
But then the 1175 monastery of Santa María de Óvila wasted away some time in crates on a San Francisco pier. – El Pais (Spain)
Alone In Rome, Before The Tourists Return
Italy was the first to lock down, and one of the hardest lockdowns. “Now most of Italy is in a ‘white zone,’ and museums can operate at their full summer schedule. Still, on a Saturday, I counted four other visitors to the most anticipated show of the year in Rome: ‘The Torlonia Marbles: Collecting Masterpieces,’ at the Capitoline, showcasing a collection of Greek and Roman sculpture unseen for decades.” – The New York Times
Jersey City Residents Question Pompidou Plans To Build Jersey Outpost
“Everyone agrees that the Pompidou is an extraordinary asset for Jersey City. But we just raised a levy on homeowners because we didn’t have the money for school funding. How can we then bring more financial debt to the table for a museum?” – Hyperbeast
Pompidou Centre Plucks Head Of Picasso Museum As Its Next Leader
Laurent Le Bon, 52, faces a challenging term. The Paris museum is scheduled to close from 2023 to 2027 for renovations to deal with its antiquated heating and cooling system, escalators that frequently break down and asbestos in the structure that needs to be removed. – The New York Times
Construction Of Mexico’s Maya Train Is Turning Up All Sorts Of Antiquities. Are They In Danger?
The 932-mile railroad project, connecting cities, historical sites, and beach resorts in the Yucatan Peninsula, has turned up more than 13,000 Mayan artifacts so far, and it’s still early in the building process. The central government says it has hired 80 archaeologists and is spending millions to identify and preserve whatever historical material is discovered, but “the Mayan community fears that history will repeat itself and their cultural heritage will once again be laid bare to looting, pillaging and destruction in the name of progress.” (in English) – El País (Spain)
Egyptian Farmer Discovers 2,600-Year-Old Monument To Pharaoh
The carved sandstone stele, measuring roughly 8½ feet long by 3½ wide, holds 15 lines of hieroglyphs topped by a winged sun disc and a cartouche representing the name of the pharaoh Apries, who reigned from 589 to 570 B.C. – Smithsonian Magazine
Banksy Decides To Own — Files For Trademarks On His Work
The trademarks apply to the use of the images on a huge range of goods including posters, handbags, umbrellas, bedsheets, clothing, rugs and many more. – The Age (Melbourne)
Reset: The Visual Artists’ Impact In Shaping Hip Hop Culture
Jean-Michel Basquiat was part of a constellation of young graffiti artists who used New York City’s streets and subways as their canvases before going on to take both the art world and hip-hop culture by storm. – The New York Times
Fury Over Choice Of Bosses For Pompidou Center’s Brussels Branch
A jury made up of museum professionals selected Kasia Redzisz, a senior curator at Tate Liverpool, to be artistic director of Kanal-Centre Pompidou, the museum’s outpost in the Belgian capital. But the museum’s board partly overruled the jury’s decision, appointing as co-director Bernard Blistène, the jury’s runner-up and director of the Pompidou’s Paris flagship until the end of this month. (Senior cultural officials in France must retire after age 65; Blistène is 66.) Art world professionals are denouncing his appointment alongside Redzisz as “an offensive act of sexism and a blatant insult to her expertise and capacities.” – Artnet
AI Used To Restore Rembrandt’s “Night Watchman”
“It is wonderful to be able to now see with our own eyes The Night Watch as Rembrandt intended it to be seen.” – BBC
What’s So Difficult About The Color Violet?
“Over the past 20 years, I visited 193 museums in 42 different countries. Equipped with 1,500 Munsell colour chips – the world-standard samples for colour science – I examined 139,892 works of art, searching for violet.” – Psyche
Reconciling With Cezanne
You don’t look at a Cézanne, some ravishing late works excepted. You study it, registering how it’s done—in the drawings, with tangles of line and, often, patches of watercolor. – The New Yorker
How Did This Pair Of 17th-Century Paintings End Up In The Dumpster At A Highway Rest Stop?
A 64-year-old man spotted the artworks — a 1665 self-portrait by Pietro Bellotti and a painting of a youth by the 17th-century Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten — in the garbage of a rest stop in Bavaria in mid-May. Authorities have not identified the owner of the canvases and have appealed to the public for information. – Artnet
How To Repurpose Those Office Skyscrapers?
Instead of designing buildings for specific purposes that may fade or disappear, architects and developers should create buildings that can accommodate a variety of uses, from offices to residential spaces to hotels to healthcare facilities. Towers should be designed to be neutral. – Fast Company
Here’s What It Takes To Move A 60,000-Pound Fresco By Diego Rivera
“After a four-year, multimillion-dollar undertaking involving mechanical engineers, architects, art historians, fresco experts, art handlers and riggers from the United States and Mexico, the 30-ton, 74-foot-wide-by-22-foot mural” — titled Pan-American Unity, painted in 1940 and installed at City College of San Francisco in 1961 — “has been carefully extracted and moved across town to San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where it will go on display on June 28.” Carol Pogash reports on how it was done. – The New York Times
Is It Okay To Resell An NFT Artwork If You’re The Artist?
Part of the problem with NFTs is that there is not yet any shared culture around reproductions or derivative works of short video, animations, or audio-visual works that derive their primary profit potential from NFT sales. – Slate
Giant “Marilyn” Statue Unveiled In Palm Springs — How Offensive Can It Get?
The aim is to saunter between a woman’s spread legs, look up her billowing dress and snicker at her panty-clad crotch — or, better yet, snap a photo for posting on social media. With Marilyn Monroe as its doleful model, this adolescent sculptural trash is presented as a welcome draw for desert resort tourism, battered during the COVID-19 pandemic. – Los Angeles Times
Why The Pompidou Center Is Putting Its American Branch In Jersey City
“Free space and funding, mostly (and that 15-minute PATH [train] ride to Manhattan). In fact, the museum agreed to the four-story warehouse space sight unseen after a French cultural attaché visited the site once to seal the deal.” – Curbed
Banksy Loses More Trademarks In Europe
“The European Union’s intellectual property office just reinforced last month’s invalidation of a trademark owned by the British street artist Banksy. The latest rulings issued from the office’s ‘cancellation department’ this morning relate to two of the anonymous artist’s most famous images, Radar Rat and Girl with an Umbrella. The judgment was made in favor of Full Colour Black, a U.K. greeting card company which recreates Banksy’s works for sale.” – Artnet
Why There Are So Few Skyscrapers In Europe
Of the 218 skyscrapers constructed on the continent to date, 66% of them are located in just five cities – London, Paris, Frankfurt, Moscow and Istanbul. – B1M
Misogynist Artwork In China Draws Furor (In A Way It Didn’t Eight Years Ago)
The artist proceeded to rank the women “from the prettiest to the ugliest,” stringing together around 5,000 grainy clips into a nearly eight-hour-long video with numbers at the bottom of each image to indicate the woman’s ranking. – The New York Times
Do We Really Need Public Statues?
We want to mark important events and people. But which ones? And who should decide? And are we creating an unreconcileable hierarchy of what’s important (and what’s not). – Aisle Say
Where Is The Art World After COVID? Look To Documenta
Documenta is also a barometer for changes in the world around it, as a major new exhibition in Berlin demonstrates. – The New York Times