Arts and Culture Headlines

Goal of LACMA’s redesign is to have architecture serve the art

Culled from blogs, newspapers, magazines, and art media sites, bringing you the most interesting art headlines . . .

Extraordinary Measures at Belsay Hall: Art Review (Guardian) The beautiful room is empty. The atmosphere is tense and cold, even though the sun glows beyond the high windows. You open the door to leave, only to find another door before you – and through it a further surprise. In the next room sits a naked man, flinching and clutching at his wooden stool as if terrified by your sudden arrival.

A Taste of the Communal on Display: Art Review (Boston Globe) I don’t particularly care for the art produced by the members of the so-called Bloomsbury group. It gives off a feeling — like so much early modern English art — of politeness, a sense that good manners and collegiality will always triumph over true feeling.

How Google Is Killing An Arts Site (ARTicles) via ArtFagCity On the web, Google gives the words “too big to fail” new meaning. The company’s dominance in directing the flow of information and people around the web is so big that if Google decides to block information, then there’s not much you can do about it. And once you get caught up in its gears, it’s difficult to extricate yourself without getting ground up in the process.

Chameleon House: Anderson Anderson Architecture (Arch Daily) This house is a tower rising above the rolling topography of its cherry orchard site, peering outwards toward spectacular westward views of Lake Michigan and the surrounding agricultural landscape.

Villaraigosa wants to rescind arts grant cuts that stirred protests (LA Times) Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has backed away from his controversial plan to cut the city’s arts grants by $415,000 and give the money to four other cultural organizations he picked himself.

In the Presence of Haunting (Art in America) That the frozen of the image is always in part a memento mori is an endlessly complex trope of the last century, because of the parts of the captured subject that remain alive. How various modes of documentation—video of film in conversation with photography, installation work—differ from straight photography is the subject of the Guggenheim’s current survey from its collection, Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance.

Thinking past the museum gallery white box (LA Times) Museums, says art historian Carol Duncan, “are rituals of display of power and wealth.”

Buckwalter, wishing, for once, you would just stop coping (Two Coats of Paint) “Well, I Wish For Once, You Would Just Stop Coping,” a selection of recent drawings from San Francisco-based artist, blogger, and mixtape master, Timothy Buckwalter, opens at Factory Outlet Gallery, in Mokelumne Hill, California today.

Iva Gueorguieva at Angles Gallery: Art Review (LA Times) The great art historian Leo Steinberg coined the term “homeless representation” to describe the way Jasper Johns’ paintings seemed to be down to earth and out of this world: utterly ordinary in their use of words, numbers and symbols yet existentially harrowing in feel, atmosphere and sentiment.

Marc Quinn: Just don’t call it a freak show (Guardian) With sculptures of the ‘pregnant man’, a woman with massive, surgically enhanced breasts, Michael Jackson and Pamela Anderson, what is Marc Quinn’s latest exhibition all about?

The Blue-Chip Period (NYTimes) Optimism has returned to the multibillion-dollar art market. Expectations are so high that many will be disappointed if Picasso’s 1932 painting “Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Nude, Green Leaves and Bust)” doesn’t break the record for a work of art sold at auction when it is offered at Christie’s on Tuesday.

Must Bad Painting be Good? (artnetMag) When I read that Miami collector Craig Robins actually owned 29 works by Marlene Dumas and was initiating legal action alleging that he was prevented from buying another Dumas because he had actually dared to sell one, I thought, “Please, Mr. Robins, do yourself a favor and dump all 29 on the market now.”

Oil spill approaches Louisiana coast (Big Picture) Late on the night of April 20th, 50 miles from the shore of Louisiana, a fire broke out aboard the Transocean Deepwater Horizon oil rig under lease by BP, with 126 individuals on board. After a massive explosion, all but 11 of the crew managed to escape as the rig was consumed by fire, later collapsing and sinking into the Gulf.