12:44pm
Just in case you’ve been quarantined with swine flu or distracted by something trivial like the 40th anniversary of Apollo 11, I am here to tell you that Antony Gormley’s long-awaited contribution to the empty Fourth Plinth has finally arrived in London’s Trafalgar Square. With One & Other, Britain’s Greatest Living Sculptor has invited the Great British People to occupy a space ‘normally reserved for statues of Kings and Generals’, becoming ‘an image of themselves, and a representation of the whole of humanity’.
Every hour for 100 days without a break, a different person is making the pedestal their own....
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4:04pm
1) It emerged this week that three libraries housed at the Courtauld Insititute – the Witt, the Conway and the Photographic Survey – are under threat after the staff who run them were served redundancy notices. The Witt contains around 2 million photographs of work by 70,000 artists from 1200 onwards. The Photographic Survey, begun under the helm of Anthony Blunt, contains a record of 600 private collections in England and Wales. The Conway comprises over a million images of sculpture, ivories, seals and stained glass.
2) The Dia Art Foundation in New York has voiced concern that the latest...
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2:25pm
‘Hell is other people’. Tate Britain’s retrospective of Richard Long’s land art, ‘Heaven and Earth’, gave me cause to agree with Jean-Paul Satre’s sentiment. The artist shows a heavenly earth found through solitary walks. The exhibition includes photographs, maps and texts from Long’s travels in seemingly uninhabited and timeless landscapes; rock sculptures reminiscent of dry stone walls and entropic yet geometric mud paintings inspired by his epic walks. It feels blissful escapism.
The Turner Prize-winning land artist from Bristol has a refreshing and enviably humble outlook on existence. He enjoys ‘the simple pleasures of well-being, independence, opportunism, eating, dreaming, happenstance...
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4:51pm
To rationalise the irrational and materialise the immaterial nature of the creative brain would be a task only attempted by the brave or the batty. But that is just what the exhibition ‘Walking in My Mind’ at London’s Hayward Gallery attempts to do. Walking around the installations that depict the artists’ creative mindscapes one is enticed, in an attempt to relate to the works, to either pamper or panic oneself with self-analysis or indulge the artist’s invitation to be psychologically dissected. The exhibition is made up of 10 self-portraits that immerse the viewer in a symbolic medley of sound, video...
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4:44pm
1) The British Museum has announced that two-thirds of the funds required for its proposed new wing have been raised. The UK government has pledged £22.5 million of the £220 million needed, and a private donor has pledged £37.5 million.
Bloomberg article
2) The Chicago Children’s Museum is tussling with severe financial difficulties, just one year after it was granted permission to move to the city’s Grant Park. It is claimed that there is a 50-50 chance of the project being completed as the economy continues to struggle. The news is likely to be welcomed by local...
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Recent and upcoming shows explore J.G. Ballard's influence on the visual arts, and an exhibition on art and magic proves unsettling.
A new report highlights the threats to one of Europe's least-known legacies of historic buidlings: the country houses of Silesia.
A visit to a great art fair such as TEFAF is a reminder of some fundamental but undervalued aspects of art history.
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