Art and Art History News | November 3rd
Art and Art History News | November 3rd
Katrina Grant
Portrait of Adolf and Catharina Croeser on Oude Delft, Jan Havicksz. Steen, 1655, from Rijksmuseum, Rijkstudio.
The Rijksmuseum is the latest museum to make a massive number (125 000 so far) of high quality, zoomable images of its collection available online without any copyright restrictions. The museum is encouraging people to create galleries of their favourite works, print out the images on posters or ‘re-mix’ them to create new art.
Looters are stripping ancient sites in Bulgaria - reports suggest that as many as 50 000 people could be involved in daily trasure hunting raids.
Ben Eltham in Crikey on the contribution the arts sector can make to engagement with Asia.
One of America’s foremost art critics Dave Hickey says he is walking away from the arts world because it is ‘calcified, self-reverential and a hostage to rich collectors who have no respect for what they are doing.’
James Farago on Art.sy,and the Myth of the Online Art Market, a website that ‘promises to connect promises to introduce users to art they’ll enjoy via a sophisticated recommendation engine’. Farago suggests that selling art in the digital space doesn’t work well in the digital space because ‘A work of art gains meaning and importance not from intrinsic qualities, but from its position within a network of institutions—museums, galleries, art schools, magazines, etc.’ But surely one of the reasons is a little more simple than that, selling art is fundamentally different to selling music or movies, there are fewer things to be sold. When an internationally famous musician relesses a new single anyone can buy it, when a famous artist makes a new work only one person can buy it.
The Art Newspaper reports that Peru’s “Sistine Chapel” shines again - San Pedro Apóstol de Andahuaylillas, on the Andean Baroque route, has undergone a four-year, $1.5m restoration.
On the 500th anniversary of the Sistine Chapel’s unveiling the Vatican is contemplating restricting visitor numbers, both to improve the visitor experience and for conservation reasons.
The BBC has an interesting series of radio programs on the Sistine Chapel with experts such as Martin Kemp and A.C. Grayling available to listen to here.
The Art Gallery of South Australia has joined the Google Art project.
10 Reasons not to write about the Art Market (pdf link).
State museums and galleries have recently announced several exhibitions for 2013. The NGV is following up its summer Neo Impressionism exhibition with Impressionism for its 2013 Melbourne Winter Masterpiece exhibition with ‘Monet’s Garden: The Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris’. This will be the tenth Melbourne Winter MAsterpiece at the NGV since they began in 2004 (with an Impressionism exhibition…) The Melbourne Museum, Queensland Museum, Art Gallery of New South Wales adn the Western Australian Museum will all host the travelling exhibition Afghanistan: Hidden Treasures from the National Museum, Kabul over 2013 and 2014. While the MCA in Sydney has announced a Yoko Ono exhibition to open in November next year.
Hurricane Sandy has done a lot of damage to art galleries in Chelsea in New York.
The Royal Academy in London is to host a broad survey exhibition of Australian art.
