In fair Verona, where we lay our scene, thieves have stolen 17 valuable artworks from a museum.
Tintoretto
Posted inArt
The Secret Life of Paintings
Last weekend in a Doylestown, Pennsylvania—which boasts not one but two locally owned, well-stocked bookstores—I picked up an old Phaidon edition of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy for ten bucks.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week… the Rothko Chapel at 40, artists and their audiences, Ai Weiwei 25 yrs ago, ageism & photographers, honeybees & humans design together, the commerce of fan art, Tintoretto at the Venice Biennale, AIDS at 30, IBM & the Met collaborate to preserve art, Kickstarter is the 3rd largest comic book publisher in America.
Posted inArt
Cutting the 2011 Venice Biennale Jargon
Curated by Bice Curiger, best known as the editor-in-chief and co-founder of the respected art magazine Parkett, the 2011 Venice Biennale will be titled ILLUMInations, in a play on words and typography that now comes standard for big deal exhibitions. The name is a combo of “illuminate” and “nations,” terms that Curiger uses to refer to the “dissemination” of the “current developments in international art.”
In other words, the Biennale will take as its theme the spread of ideas and artistic currents beyond the limitations of national boundaries and identities, taking on culture at the international level rather than on a country-to-country basis. Yet the Biennale is known for its use of national pavilions to stage exhibitions as something akin to national artistic showcases. How do you go post-national with a nationally and politically charged event?
