Blog Category: Around the web

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  Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

  Unauthorized touching makes some museums a multi-sensory experience–but why do museum-goers do it?

• A team of archeologists from the University of Cincinnati recently discovered an intricately carved sealstone that “will change the way that prehistoric art is viewed.”
• The National Gallery in London will be exhibiting a survey of black & white paintings exploring why artists from the 14th through 20th centuries have chosen to create monochrome works.
• Research shows that while people can recognize corporate logos, they are terrible at recreating them as drawings.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

• Stare deep into this painting to find out if you are a psychic.
• Can public art protect us from terrorists? Turns out the answer is yes.
• Capitalism has heightened our perception of color.
• Was the Mona Lisa originally intended to be a nude, and is her smile more science than art?
• Even more Mona: A video shows how Leonardo employed virtual reality techniques in the creation of the famed work.
• Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy will undergo two years of restoration.
• Rembrandt’s The Night Watch is now required viewing for school children in the Netherlands.
• Snapchat installed Jeff Koons sculptures virtually around the world, and then another artist vandalized them.
• A Salvador Dalí painting used to hang at Rikers Island–until the guards stole it.
• Mysterious Pop Art satirist Vern Blosum has passed away at 81.
• An exhibition opening in Naples this November will create a dialog between contemporary artworks and artifacts from Pompeii.
• What would you do with 95-million-year-old ink?

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Art history

• One of Edgar Degas’s models wrote a scathing memoir of the Impressionist master. Or did she?
• We know this has been making the rounds, but just in case you missed it: people who found their doppelgängers in museums. (Also, we like using the word doppelgänger.)
• The fascinating history of, er, tinkling in art.
• Grounded in the theory that ideas, emotions, and even events, can manifest as visible auras, Thought-Forms (1901) is an intriguing book featuring abstract drawings that predate modernist abstraction.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Visual arts

• The most famous person to have died in the Seine River has no identity at all. Her death mask was mass-produced and sold as a decorative item, making her a muse for artists, poets, and other writers. She is kept alive these days in an out-of-the-way, family-run workshop in a Paris suburb.
• Deconstructing The Scream, Edvard Munch’s famous painting.
• “My sister, Fauzia, died too young and all we had left of her was her art – small, beautiful, incomplete pieces of her.”

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

UNUSUAL

• How surreal: Salvador Dali’s body is to be exhumed to resolve a paternity case.
• An interview that asks the tough question: how does a curator match art with cannabis strains? Unfortunately, it’s not very clear on how one can get that kind of job.
• The illustrated history of the morse–a hairy, fearsome walrus-like beast that was said to snooze on cliffs while hanging by its teeth.

In 1967, the art critic Michael Fried wrote an essay about Minimalism called “Art and Objecthood”; this isn’t at all what he meant by it, but it’s the perfect description for the following links:

• We’ll start off with 11 everyday objects transformed into works of art.
• And then we’ll move on to the world’s unlikeliest porn star.
• With that out of the way, here’s how things–figurines, fishers, bugs, and bats–become sacred objects in a museum.
• Here’s an example: this guy collects photographs of lost gloves. Which turns out to be more moving than it sounds.
• We’re not sure we’d quite call latte drawings art, but they’re definitely impressive.
• What happens when an object stops being art? This artist couldn’t decide what to do with the 15,000 coins she used in an art installation, so she set them free for people to do what they wanted with them.
• And we’ll wrap-up this section with this: The Guggenheim Museum in New York is one of the world’s most iconic buildings, and now you can build your own–with LEGO bricks.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

• Coming to America: a statue of George Washington as, presumably, only Martha saw him–in the buff.
• A very brief history of the artists who dine out on their reputation.
• Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-Thon added 6,500 more women in the arts to Wikipedia.
• The Musée de la Civilisation in Quebec City, Canada, is inviting people from around the world to upload their own photos to find their ancient doppelgängers. Try it yourself!
• Some of the earliest examples of images made out of words on the page are in this marvelous 9th-century manuscript known as the Aratea. We’re partial to the rabbit.
• Why do people try to destroy museum masterpieces?
• Une histoire du chapeau en art: a slide show of hats in Impressionist art. (For more, check out our own history of hat-making.)
• Why was this never on Charlie’s Angels? Farrah Fawcett was a talented painter and sculptor.
• The stats geeks at Five Thirty Eight analyzed half a million pieces in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and glimpsed the history of civilization.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

• Georges Seurat placed dots on a canvas to depict park-goers lounging along the Seine in 1884. The technique was known as pointillism, and it seemed new at the time. We now come to find out it was really 38,000 years old.
• African American activist and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois directed the creation of more than 60 hand-drawn charts, graphs, and maps that visualized data on the state of black life in America in 1900. They look amazing.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

Art

• The strange story behind the CIA calendar the CIA gift shop refuses to sell.
• What it’s like to be a professional cheese sculptor.
• Related: a brief history of food as art.
• Were JG Ballard’s billboards actually coded Salvador Dalí paintings?
• We totally identify with this woman who accidentally got locked inside a museum in Germany.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Some stories we’ve been reading this month:

Issues

• A new report suggests the arts do not help to solve social problems, contrary to popular opinion. Might we be concentrating on the wrong things?
• For a long time, Artemisia Gentileschi’s paintings have been interpreted almost exclusively as symbolic revenge against the man who raped her, but a historian argues we should see her as a champion of strong women instead.