African American Museum Breaks Ground In DC "An ordinary sales slip consigning a young woman to slavery is among the chilling items that will be displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture." Bloomberg 02/21/12

email this story | Posted 02/22/12@11:06AM

Rethinking The Suburb "Today's suburb has little to do with the outwardly tidy, seething, monochrome world of Updike or Revolutionary Road. It's got its own new set of dysfunctions: boarded windows and weedy lawns, acres of sparsely used parking lots flanking clogged roads, immigrant workers jamming by the dozen into houses conceived for the Cleavers, household food budgets eaten up at the gas pump. Then there are all the old urban ills of poverty, violence, drugs, and racial friction, which have migrated to places that were designed for escaping them." New York Magazine 02/21/12

email this story | Posted 02/22/12@10:50AM

The New Getty Museum Chief's Salary According to a compensation disclosure dated Feb. 14 and published on the Getty website, his base salary is $690,000, and this year he also will receive a signing bonus of $150,000. Los Angeles Times 02/22/12

email this story | Posted 02/22/12@10:44AM

Munch's Scream Could Sell For $80M At Auction "Sotheby's will offer the only privately owned version of Edvard Munch's haunting work The Scream at an auction in New York on May 2 where it expects to fetch over $80 million, the highest pre-sale value the auctioneer has ever put on a work of art." Reuters 02/21/12

email this story | Posted 02/22/12@12:05AM

Proposed Washington Law Would Require State To Sell Art To Fund Scholarships "So how broke is the state of Washington? It's so broke it could start selling off its art collection - including some masterpieces - and using the money to pay for low-income students to go to college." The Daily Herald (Everett, Wash.) 02/20/12

email this story | Posted 02/21/12@11:59PM

Italian Police Arrest Gang Using X-Rays To Help Forge Antiquities "A two-and-a-half-year-long suspected archaeological fraud involving thousands of forged Greek and Etruscan artefacts, a hospital x-ray machine, a philanthropic aristocrat and a sophisticated network of forgers has come to an abrupt end after police raids late last year on two homes belonging to alleged members of a gang." The Art Newspaper 02/20/12

email this story | Posted 02/21/12@10:09AM

Mona Lisa Copy Draws Big Crowds At Prado "Crowds gathered Tuesday at Madrid's Prado Museum to view a copy of the "Mona Lisa" for the first time since restoration revealed it was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo da Vinci's apprentices as he worked on the original." Yahoo! (AP) 02/20/12

email this story | Posted 02/21/12@09:52AM

Aspen Puts Abstract Art On Ski-Lift Tickets "Ski-lift tickets usually just consist of a logo, a bar code and an expiration date. But in Aspen, Colo., they now display limited editions of Mark Grotjahn's art. The Aspen Art Museum arranged for the release last week of five different batches of tickets featuring his work, part of an effort to bring art to unlikely places." The Wall Street Journal 02/18/12

email this story | Posted 02/20/12@11:54PM

Even Wasilla, Alaska Can Have Fights Over Public Art "Sarah Palin's hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, is back in the news - but not for anything the former vice presidential candidate has said or done. A public sculpture at the town's high school is causing a ruckus for what some claim to see as a depiction of the female genitalia." Los Angeles Times 02/20/12

email this story | Posted 02/20/12@11:53PM

A New Generation Of Civil Rights Museums "Collectively, they also signal an emerging era of scholarship and interest in the history of both civil rights and African-Americans that is to a younger generation what other major historical events were to their grandparents." The New York Times 02/19/12

email this story | Posted 02/20/12@08:11AM

Where Will The Getty Now Stand On Antiquities Repatriation? "Getty director James Cuno has denounced repatriation claims of looted antiquities as "nationalistic" and argued against placing limits on museum purchases of objects with an uncertain origin. Getty Museum director Timothy Potts, whose appointment Cuno announced this week, has echoed some of those views." Los Angeles Times 02/17/12

email this story | Posted 02/20/12@08:04AM

Ruin Porn Isn't Anything New - And It's All Too Human "This sense of having lived on too late, of having survived the demolition of past dreams of the future, is what gives the ruin its specific frisson, and it still animates art and writing. But it's historically bound up with more pressing worries about the fate of one's own civilisation." The Guardian 02/17/12

email this story | Posted 02/19/12@09:26PM

Bronze Boy (With A Bit Of Cheek) To Decorate Trafalgar Square "With his curls and wry smile, this golden boy in his little shorts and braces peers down from his bronze steed, one arm raised delicately. He looks almost classical. But look again. Those shorts could be leather. He might also be down the disco." The Guardian 02/19/12

email this story | Posted 02/19/12@09:00PM

Manhunt Launched For Art Thieves In Greece "A manhunt was under way Saturday in Greece for two suspects who tied up a guard, stormed the Archeological Museum of Olympia, smashed glass casings and stole dozens of small statues." Meanwhile, the Minister of Culture resigned. CNN 02/18/12

email this story | Posted 02/19/12@08:02AM

This Art Project Isn't For Chickens (Though It Does Involve Killing A Few) "'The Story of Chickens: A Revolution' is set to begin with an unveiling of a mobile chicken coop. ... It ends with a public-invited slaughter and a potluck dinner with the chickens on the menu." Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World 02/18/12

email this story | Posted 02/19/12@08:00AM

Papermaker Might Save History, One Page At A Time "The notion of a page is being expanded as we speak. I imagine the book going in two directions -- one as an art object, printed on paper in small quantities and so expensive only the rich can afford it, and the other as an electronic form that will incorporate still images, animation, a diverse set of links to the open Web and a significant social component." The New York Times 02/17/12

email this story | Posted 02/19/12@07:56AM

Social Media - The New Artist Gallery "Try not to think of your art and your personal life as disparate entities -- have your Twitter and Facebook feeds be a blend of your own personality and your art, which makes it easier for people to get to know you, and makes the act of social networking feel more natural." Mashable 02/17/12

email this story | Posted 02/17/12@07:53AM

Opposition To Gehry's Eisenhower Memorial Going McCarthyite? Christopher Knight calls out a conservative group whose campaign against Gehry's very un-Neoclassical design for the monument includes, as Knight sees it, guilt by association and smears against an artist whom Gehry used as a consultant regarding the memorial's sculpture. Los Angeles Times 02/16/12

email this story | Posted 02/17/12@12:05AM

Marina Abramovic To Create Performance Art Museum "Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaas earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York. ... and the museum will be devoted to performance art pieces of 'six hours minimum.' Some of them will go on for days." New York Magazine 02/15/12

email this story | Posted 02/16/12@11:55PM

A Need For Curators to Run Museums... Who will "succeed the 60 or so ­directors planning to retire by 2019? Instead of candidates steeped in the ethos of museums, the top jobs would increasingly go to people drawn from the business world." The Art Newspaper 02/16/12

email this story | Posted 02/16/12@09:50AM

Just How Do You Authenticate A Banksy? "Fans and prospective buyers turn to Banksy's official website (banksy.co.uk) for photographic evidence of murals, and the second work in Liverpool does not appear online. However, the artist neither officially sanctions his murals online, nor signs the actual street works for fear of legal repercussions." The Art Newspaper 02/16/12

email this story | Posted 02/16/12@08:42AM

An Art Critic Opines On Leonardo Live Cinema Event Roberta Smith: "[It's] a strangely hectic, occasionally informative and sometimes even insightful high-definition tour of the [UK] National Gallery exhibition, 'Leonardo da Vinci: Painter in the Court of Milan.' ... Thankful as I am to have an inkling of what the Leonardo show was like, I can't say that it is entirely a promising debut." The New York Times 02/16/12

email this story | Posted 02/16/12@12:06AM

Great Dachshunds In Art "Nabokov admired one. Chekhov cuddled with one. E.B. White wrote poetry to them. Gary Shteyngart tweets about one. (Also: Warhol had two. Picasso drew one.)" (And your humble correspondent was raised by dachshunds.) Melville House 02/14/12 (slideshow)

email this story | Posted 02/15/12@11:59PM

Why So Much Turnover Of Leadership At The Getty Museum" "With Potts now coming aboard (he starts work in September), four talented museum people will have occupied the director's office in the last 12 years. The turnover is not hard to explain. Alone among major art museums in the United States, the Getty's director reports to a paid president, not to a board of trustees." Los Angeles Times 02/15/12

email this story | Posted 02/15/12@08:19AM

A Link Between Fear And Abstract Art A newly published study finds people are more likely to be moved and intrigued by abstract paintings if they have just experienced a good scare. This suggests the allure of art may be "a byproduct of one's tendency to be alarmed by such environmental features as novelty, ambiguity, and the fantastic." Miller-McCune 02/14/12

email this story | Posted 02/15/12@07:54AM

Getty Museum Names Timothy Potts Director "A Sydney native who early on ran the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, Potts, 53, is currently the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England. He is best known in the U.S. for running the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1998 to 2007." Los Angeles Times 02/14/12

email this story | Posted 02/15/12@12:02AM

More Than 400 Stolen Expressionist Artworks Turn Up In Warehouse "Karel Appel, a leading expressionist, died at 85 in 2006. He never recovered from the loss of a lifetime's worth of drawings, sketches, notebooks and other works believed to be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds." A logistics company found the trove while cleaning out a recently warehouse. The Guardian (UK) 02/14/12

email this story | Posted 02/14/12@11:56PM