Required Reading
This week, decommissioning public art, Paula Cooper and Larry Gagosian speak, the mosaic man of the East Village, the Vancouver Art Gallery has a radical idea, Warhol's grave and more …
This week, decommissioning public art, Paula Cooper and Larry Gagosian speak, the mosaic man of the East Village, the Vancouver Art Gallery has a radical idea, Warhol’s grave and more …
We often talk about the problems of commissioning public art but how about decommissioning public art? Should some work have a limited time on this earth?
A wonder video interview with Jim Powers, the infamous mosaic man of the East Village. His street art has come to represent an important part of the visual identity of the whole neighborhood.
A long interview with gallerist Paula Cooper in Interview Magazine. She provides this insight into her lack of planning (which sounds incredible for a business owner to admit):
I don’t plan. I’m really bad about planning, especially when it comes to working with artists. If an artist can’t do something on a given date, I accept that. It doesn’t make me upset. I keep some space open throughout the year because something wonderful might come up, and I want to be able to work that in.
The Vancouver Art Gallery is grappling with the vision that will guide its future and one fascinating proposal suggests rather than build one major $300 m extension to the museum perhaps a better solution would be to erect 10 $30 m structures that each specialize in a different department around the city. Whether it works or not, I do like the outside the box thinking.
Did you know that while 50% of Wikipedia users are female, only 9% of their editors are women? Thankfully, this percentage is slowly increasing.
An interview with architect Wang Shu, the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Prize, includes this great quote:
“We want to copy Manhattan … I love Manhattan. It’s a very interesting place. But if you want to copy something that was accomplished in 200 years, it’s very difficult. New York was not designed by architects, it was designed by time.”
Le Figaro interviews supergallerist Larry Gagosian. And while the interview is in French, those of you who read the language should take a look (though I guess you can always plug it into Google Translate to get the gist). And this observation by the journalist caught my attention, “The Gagosian Gallery is the most horizontal management you can imagine.”
NPR tells the story of Andy Warhol’s grave:
It’s often said Warhol once suggested his tombstone should be blank except for one word, “figment.” That didn’t happen.
And finally, I forgot to include this a few weeks back but Herbert Vogel, of Dorothy & Herbert Vogel art collecting couple fame, died in late July. The postal worker, along with his school teacher spouse, amassed a world-renowned collection of mostly conceptual art that numbered over 5,000 works and was donated to the National Gallery of Art in DC and 50 other museums across the US.
