Arts news

• Russia commemorates 1917 revolution—timidly

  12-03-2017 22:00
  
  The centenary of the Russian Revolution is being commemorated this year by major museums in Europe and the US. The Royal Academy of Arts in London, for example, is hosting a show (until 17 April), with loans from Russia, which examines the extraordinary creativity that followed the revolution and lasted until Stalins brutal regime clamped down on all forms of creative expression. Meanwhile, the Museum of Modern Art in New York has drawn on its collection to tell the story of the Russian avant-g
  
  Read more

• Object lessons: a late Shang dynasty bronze wine vessel, a Ming dynasty dish and a sculpture by Niamh Barry

  12-03-2017 22:00
  
  Bronze ritual ram-form wine vessel (zun), late Shang dynasty, 12th-11th century BCImportant Chinese Art from the Fujita Museum, Christies New York, 16 March
  Estimate: $6m-$8m
  Chief among the treasures to emerge from the Osaka-based Fujita Museum is this ancient wine vessel, which was acquired before 1940 by the family of museum founder Denzaboro Fujita. A very rare example of a Shang dynasty vessel in the form of an animal (there are only about a dozen known examples), this ram-shaped vessel is
  
  Read more

• Comment: Scholarly research is flourishing but curators’ ability to judge an object’s quality is not

  12-03-2017 22:00
  
  It has long been fashionable to lament the decline of scholarship in UK museums. And it is true that in some museums, particularly those funded by local authorities, concentration on outreach, combined with cuts, has tended to marginalise scholarship. But in university and national museums research is alive and well; indeed, more and better research is done in museums now than ever before, with results that are visible in the quality of their exhibitions, long-term displays and publications. Re
  
  Read more

• Comment: Is expertise at risk at the Victoria and Albert Museum?

  12-03-2017 22:00
  
  What if the Natural History Museum in London quietly ceased to have an expert in most of its species of coleoptera (beetles to you and me), one of the most numerous forms of animal life? Would we not feel that it was failing in its basic responsibility to both the collections and the public?
  This is the equivalent of what has happened at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, which used to be a world leader in its knowledge of most branches of the decorative arts. Since 2016 it has
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Christie’s plans to close South Kensington salreoom

  12-03-2017 22:00
  Christies is planning to close its second London salreoom in South Kensington by the end of this year, it announced last week. The shake up is part of a review of the companys operations, which are increasingly focused on Asia and online sales.We are considering shifting more sales into our key regional hubs and online, says Guillaume Cerutti, Christies chief executive officer. This means we are now considering consolidating into one sales site in London and changing our sales offering in Amste
  
  Read more

• Christie’s plans to close South Kensington saleroom

  12-03-2017 22:00
  Christies is planning to close its second London saleroom in South Kensington by the end of this year, it announced last week. The shake up is part of a review of the companys operations, which are increasingly focused on Asia and online sales.We are considering shifting more sales into our key regional hubs and online, says Guillaume Cerutti, Christies chief executive officer. This means we are now considering consolidating into one sales site in London and changing our sales offering in Amste
  
  Read more

• Artangel wants YOU

  12-03-2017 18:44
  
  The UK art commissioning body Artangel has launched a fresh open call for new ideas, but is casting its net a little wider this time. For the Artangel Everywhere initiative, applicants will be invited to create a digital work that can be experienced online (prospective candidates can also remain anonymous when applying). Proposals are invited for projects that embrace the idea of a connected community and can be experienced by people around the world, says a statement. Artists can be based
  
  Read more

• The art of surgery: life drawing and leprosy

  12-03-2017 18:30
  
  When an illustrator visited a Nepalese hospital for patients with the disease, he was struck by the links between art and the doctors’ precise skills‘Life drawing”, “still life” and “life class” are all fairly mundane terms I thought only applied to nude figures or fruit bowls in an art studio. However, in November, I stood and drew in the corner of a plastic surgeon’s theatre in Lalgadh hospital, near Janakpur in Nepal. The theatre was set up to o
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Why I snapped up the Headington shark house

  12-03-2017 17:30
  
  My father fought for years to keep John Buckley’s sculpture of a shark, which ‘crashed’ through the roof of my childhood home. When it was once again threatened with removal, I had to save itI was born into a family with a slightly unusual home – it has a 25-ft fibreglass shark, designed by the sculptor John Buckley, crashing through the roof tiles.The Headington shark house in east Oxford was already a year old when I was born, so it always seemed normal to me. It had la
  
  Read more

• The American Dream: Pop to the Present review – blessed be the printmakers

  12-03-2017 09:00
  
  British Museum, London
  From Ed Ruscha’s gas station to Jim Dine’s bathrobes, pop art’s vision of boom-time America predicted the demise of the land of the freeAndy Warhol never made a portrait of Donald Trump, though in 1981 the future president asked the pop artist to make a series of paintings of Trump Tower, then under construction. The Tower had special significance for Warhol in that it was built on the site of the Bonwit Teller department store where he got his start maki
  
  Read more

• Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the Mask, Another Mask – review

  12-03-2017 09:00
  
  National Portrait Gallery, London
  The singular French artist Claude Cahun made a lifelong series of self-portraits in various guises. See her riveting work alongside that of admirer Gillian WearingThere is a photograph of the French artist Claude Cahun, pale and shorn, appearing double-headed like Siamese twins. The two Cahuns are fused at the shoulders. One strikes a conventional pose, attentive and outward, if starkly white-faced. The other is almost pathologically inward, the hooded eye alien
  
  Read more

• Can .art domain give the art business an online boost?

  12-03-2017 09:00
  
  Arts institutions now have the option of a new internet suffix which aims to offer greater intelligibility and authenticity and maybe help the art marketLondon’s Institute of Contemporary Art adopted the new .Art suffix last week, a sign that the art and culture business may at last be starting to come to terms with its future in the digital realm.The hip arts organisation ditched its fusty ica.org.uk web domain for the more streamlined and descriptive ica.art. The move may soon be followe
  
  Read more

• Appreciation: Howard Hodgkin, 1932-2017

  12-03-2017 09:00
  
  The Observer writer and critic remembers two emotional encounters with the great British painter, who died last weekHoward Hodgkin always used to suggest that his paintings – those life-loving explosions of impossible blues and hot pinks, violent oranges and triumphant greens – were products of an overflow of emotions.He famously spent a long time in his Bloomsbury studio looking and overpainting, waiting for the moment when the right feeling came in a rush and found its expression o
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!