On this week’s art crime blotter: a cycling-themed cow statue goes missing, one art dealer sues another over a Jeff Koons sculpture, and a former guard takes the Metropolitan Museum to court.
Jeff Koons
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Dear Adam D. Weinberg, Donna De Salvo, and Scott Rothkopf
Why doesn’t the Whitney Museum of American Art inaugurate a series of exhibitions in honor of Herman Melville? It would certainly be fitting given the museum’s recent change of address.
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After Sculpture Censorship Fiasco, Italian Officials Fail to Uncover the Naked Truth
Earlier this week, the Musei Capitolini in Rome found itself at the center of a controversy as news spread worldwide of the censorship of some of its famous nude statues in anticipation of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s visit to the institution.
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Pop Irony’s Enduring Influence in the Art Institute of Chicago’s New Contemporary Collection
CHICAGO — The Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago, which opened in 2009, has reinstated its contemporary collection after giving over most of the space in 2015 to a much-lauded retrospective of the American sculptor Charles Ray.
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Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: a photographer sued Jeff Koons over a painting from 1986, an art thief tagged the artist in an Instagram post of his loot, and Nicolas Cage agreed to return a stolen dinosaur skull.
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An Early Thanksgiving: The Wagner Gift to the Whitney
Opening in the shadow of the Paris attacks, the exhibition Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner represents — as Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in his remarks at the press preview — “a celebration of what matters in life.”
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The New Broad Museum Brings LA Lots of Blue-Chip Art and a Few Surprises
LOS ANGELES — The wait is over. After a 15-month delay, ballooning costs, and lawsuits, the Broad Museum is finally set to open this Sunday in downtown Los Angeles.
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We Painted Famous Artworks with Donald Trump’s Face
Donald Trump came under fire again this week after making some pretty outrageous statements about GOP presidential rival Carly Fiorina’s face, so it’s especially timely that someone on the internet gifted us with “Paint with Donald Trump,” a website that lets you paint with eight of Trump’s most ridiculous expressions.
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The Triumph of Revisionism: The Whitney’s American Century
With America Is Hard to See, the exhibition inaugurating its luminous new Renzo Piano building, the Whitney has reclaimed its role among the city’s museums as the engine of the new.
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Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside, Part 2
I wrote most of the first two sections of this essay (Part 1) in March 2011, but never submitted it anywhere. I think I lost interest in the subject. I thought I wrote it well before the negative critiques would surely come rolling in, even before Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney in 2014.
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Jeff Koons: Shiny on the Outside, Hollow on the Inside, Part 1
Shiny on the outside, hollow on the inside. That is how the work of the American artist, Jeff Koons, has been generally described and received, not only by those who are less than affectionate toward it but also by those who like it.
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When the Weather Gives You Snowmageddon, Make Art Snowmen
As we hunker down in anticipation of what will almost certainly be a less dramatic snowstorm than some are predicting, and begin to formulate plans for the construction of snowpersons that will immediately follow, we offer you this brief and necessarily incomplete survey of artists’ snowmen for inspiration.
