Required Reading
This week, the price of art, China's rainbow hills, the strengths of the graphic novel, Vermeer's possible secret, the best Vines, and more.
This week, the price of art, China’s rainbow hills, the strengths of the graphic novel, Vermeer’s possible secret, the best Vines, and more.
Why are people paying so much for art? The New Yorker asks art dealer David Zwirner:
“One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain — dealers, artists, curators — are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money — mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base.
An interview with graphic novelist Joe Sacco explains what he thinks graphic novels are really good at:
Q: I’m interested as well in what illustrations allow you to do in journalism and history that the written word doesn’t. What would you say are the advantages to conveying stories this way?
Joe Sacco: Let me preface it by saying I think every medium has its strengths. But I think illustrated work puts the reader directly into a picture. You open up, let’s say, a comic book, and I’ve drawn a Palestinian refugee camp — you’re inside it, and with the multiple images, you’ll hopefully get an idea of the atmosphere. As a cartoonist, you’re concentrating on giving visual information — especially in the background — that can be conveyed by multiple images. And things follow the reader around. You know, the architecture will follow the reader from one panel to another, so it becomes part of the atmosphere that the reader is imbibing. With the written word, you can describe the architecture, but you’re not going to keep mentioning it as a figure is walking down the street, you’re not going to keep mentioning what the background is. With comics you can do that.
Members of the Hopi community in Arizona have been fighting auction houses in Europe over the right to sell objects that the Native American community calls sacred. The sale of sacred Native American objects has been banned in the U.S. since 1990, but the law has no international jurisdiction. EVE auctioneers will hold a sale of about 25 “katsinam” objects on December 9 and 11. Lawyers for the Hopi tribe and advocacy group Survival International will go to court on Dec. 3 to try to block the sale.
Christopher Jobson of Colossal spotted this ice disk on the news and thought it could easily be a work by environmental artists Andy Goldsworthy:
When I first saw this giant rotating ice disk spotted in North Dakota this week, I assumed it had to be some kind of human-created object, perhaps a new piece by famed land artist Andy Goldsworthy.
But alas it wasn’t but it is still very impressive as this AP video of the ice form indicates:
An obsessive tinkerer in Texas may have helped solve the mystery of how Vermeer painted his stunningly realistic portraits:
Jenison still sounds a little surprised at how he has spent so much of the past decade. He believes he fully succeeded in his mission, but being who he is, he’s not exactly doing an end-zone dance. “It’s probably kind of important” is as far as he’ll go. When we first met, he told me he was 80 percent sure Vermeer used an optical apparatus and a procedure something like his own. After he finished his picture, his confidence was up to 90 percent. Lately, after examining a high-resolution scan of the painting provided by Buckingham Palace, he’s 95 percent sure. The most doubt-inducing part of the mystery for him remains how Vermeer kept the trade secret secret. “That’s the killer argument. That’s the best one there is. I’ve got a file of counterarguments to my own theory.”
The Victoria & Albert Museum studied the mobile behaviors of its visitors and found some interesting facts, including:
- Almost two thirds of visitors to the V&A own a smartphone and carry it with them in daily life and on their visit to the Museum.
- The majority of smartphone owners visiting the V&A are already using their phones to enhance their cultural visits.
- The V&A audience are enthusiastic about the free WiFi service provided by the Museum and the idea of accessing museum content. However, low awareness is having a significant impact on the proportion of visitors who are using the system.
- Today’s cost of international roaming mobile access (i.e. data) means that access to free WiFi is absolutely crucial in reaching foreign visitors – who comprised just under half of all visitors according to the 2011-2012 annual visitor survey – it is also an important factor in supporting the domestic audiences as well many of whom have limited data in their payplans.
- The majority of V&A visitors – and particularly those who are younger and reside in the UK – do not typically use ‘museum audioguides’. These younger visitors express a preference for using their own device, citing most often its convenience and familiarity.
Twitter’s senior vice-president of engineering confirmed this week that the Twitter Fail Whale is dead. “The Fail Whale is a thing of the past. Actually, this summer we took the Fail Whale out of production. So if you come to Twitter, and there are always gonna be problems, no service is ever perfect. But right now you will see robots instead of the Fail Whale,” he told Wired. RIP Fail Whale:
Architect Rem Koolhaas explained to Dezeen how his preoccupations have shifted from urbanism and the city to preservation and the countryside:
Mashable has chosen what they are calling “The 33 Best Vine Videos of 2013” and there is a whole lotta stop-motion animation on this list:
And ever wonder what a famous artist like Chuck Close has in his personal art collection? Well, Vogue finds out:
He then asked if I would like to see his personal collection at his apartment down the street, where he guided me through a treasure trove of art history’s heaviest hitters — from Willem de Kooning to Andy Warhol to Jasper Johns to Brice Marden, before showing me portraits by Anthony van Dyck and Tintoretto among many other Dutch, Flemish, and Italian old master paintings.
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning EST, and it is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts or photo essays worth a second look.
