Seems like a good day for Looking Around to do some looking around.
1. Fisk has decided to appeal the judge’s decision that required it to display the Alfred Stieglitz Collection that has been in storage since November 2005. Last month a Nashville judge said that Fisk could keep the collection. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, …
Not long ago Aperture published American Sports, 1970, a collection of photographs that Tod Papageorge took at various games that happened to be taking place at the height of the Vietnam era. (For one thing, 1970 was the year of Kent State.) None of them are what you …
The comment stream on yesterday’s post about bad art writing has been particularly good.
1. I agree with “ruthk’s” point that the rise of curatorial gibberish is linked to the desire of museum people to demonstrate to university scholars that they can still talk the talk, and that by moving to the more populist world of exhibitions they …
Until now I resisted the urge to complain in public about the wall cards and catalogue texts that accompany this year’s Whitney Biennial. (Let’s be clear, the Kosuth piece up there is not one of them. It just felt pertinent to the mood I’m in.) That was partly …
Fifty years ago this week, the peace symbol made its debut at a British demonstration against nuclear weapons. By now it seems like some ancient rune that rose out of a primeval folk culture. It was actually the work of one man, Gerald Holtom, a London textile designer and peace activist. What he created may not be a work of art, …
On Sunday the Pritzker Foundation announced that Jean Nouvel was this year’s winner of the Pritzker Prize, the knighthood of architecture. Here’s a link to the piece I posted on Time.com when the announcement was made. And here’s a link to a slide show we put up yesterday of his work, …
Let’s finish that conversation with Michael Conforti, director of the Clark in Williamstown. Ma. He’s also upcoming president of the Association of Art Museum Directors, so in this part we talk about some issues affecting museums generally.
LACAYO: As everybody knows, Italy’s been reclaiming antiquities from American museums that were …
Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery in London, is getting awfully fastidious. In January he let it be known that he really doesn’t think his museum should be doing big blockbuster loan shows when it’s more important to focus on scholarly exhibitions that draw attention to neglected corners of art history. Now he’s …
Every year London’s Serpentine Gallery sponsors a temporary summer pavilion designed by a major artist or architect. It frequently turns out to be an experimental space that gives clues as to where that designer is really going. When Toyo Ito, the Japanese architect I …
I sat down last week with Julia White, senior curator for Asian art at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. We talked about a few things, including Berkeley’s upcoming show called Mahjong, a selection of contemporary Chinese art from …
Lawyers for both sides were back in court today in the fight to keep the Barnes Foundation from moving to Philadelphia from its home in Merion, Pa. Opponents of the move are hoping to persuade Judge Stanley Ott, who ruled four years ago to allow the move, that new developments justify new hearings on the matter.
The argument for moving …
I was in Athens last October to get an early look at the New Acropolis Museum, which opens this fall. As you probably know, its chief purpose will be to display the surviving Parthenon marbles, roughly half of which are in Greece. The other half, the Elgin …
When I first heard that part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial would consist of “events” at the Park Avenue Armory that aren’t usually thought of as art, I wondered how I might cover one or two. But which one. The 24-hour dance marathon? Too tiring. The gypsy …
