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Celestial sorcery … Sara Ramo’s Invasion of Everything That Was Restrained (2005). Photograph: Sara Ramo/Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo
The artist Sara Ramo is also something of a magician. In Movable Planes, a tantalising show of the young Spanish-Brazilian’s photography and video at London’s Photographers’ Gallery, a screwed-up piece of newspaper becomes a meteor, a leftover balloon a black hole. Her technique is simple: she photographs her objects in series, and transforms them simply by relabelling them. Thus, an image of spilt milk in the corner of the room becomes the Milky Way. In a stop-motion animation, her bedroom mutates from a scene of domestic harmony to one of total disarray, destroyed by the hand of an unseen sorcerer’s apprentice. Ramo’s cosmic gestures are enchantingly humble: she uses whatever is at her fingertips to achieve a delightful tension between the known world and the less predictable one of our imagination.
Skye Sherwin
Guardian
Hats off today to New York’s Museum of Modern Art for its ability to have a chuckle at its own expense. The institution has tweeted a recent blog post featuring a rejection letter that the museum sent to Andy Warhol in 1956.
In the letter, the museum notifies Warhol that its collections committee has decided to turn down the drawing “Shoe,” which the artist had offered as a gift.
“I regret that I must report to you that the Committee decided, after careful consideration, that they ought not to accept it for our Collection,” wrote the museum’s Alfred H. Barr Jr.
“Let me explain that because of our severely limited gallery and storage space we must turn down many gifts offered, since we feel it is not fair to accept as a gift a work which may be shown only infrequently.”
At the bottom of the correspondence is a postscript: “P.S. The drawing may be picked up from the Museum at your convenience.”
David Ng
Culture Monster
David Hockney with Bigger Trees Near Warter. Photograph: David Levene
David Hockney is no fool. He understands art history – he has, after all, written books about it. For almost half a century he has succeeded in maintaining a place in the world of art, however unfashionable or odd the directions he happened to be taking. He’s pursued his own interests, and at the same time kept his art in the public eye. And in giving his painting Bigger Trees Near Warter to the Tate he executed a masterstroke. This painting, which has just gone on view for all to see at Tate Britain, will do his reputation wonders as the century progresses. It is a triumph.
You thought Hockney was old hat? We all get it wrong. Art is beautiful because it makes fools of us. You can set up any ideology you like, define taste by any criteria you choose, and a work of art will come along to stand your prejudice on its head. If you prove by logic and erudition that art cannot come readymade, some young philosophe will display the most incredible found object that was ever put in a vitrine. This is what happened to critics 20 years ago. Nowadays, the prejudices are reversed – and so are the surprises. As the artistic ideas of the 1990s gradually sputter out, the life comes from elsewhere. From Bridlington, in this case.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Rose Art Museum, former home of the Brandeis art collection (Photo: Guardian)
The debate continues. Here are two different takes on whether colleges should have the right to sell their art collections.
Avoiding the Next Brandeis
Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed
Brandeis Wasn’t Wrong
Rudolph H. Weingartner
Inside Higher Ed
On September 2, 2009, the World Wildlife Fund sponsored a remarkably touching public demonstration on Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt square. Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo created a thousand diminutive men out of ice and then placed them on the steps of the Concert Hall, home to the renowned Berlin Konzerthausorchester. There she left them to melt under the hot late summer sun to draw attention to the melting of the polar ice caps and the Greenland ice sheet, which, the WWF warns, could lead to changing weather patterns, rising sea levels, and the release of even more greenhouse gases into the earth’s atmosphere.
Alan Nothnagle
Lost in Berlin
Andy Warhol (Photo credit: allposters.com)
Masterpieces of the Universe: The famous art owned by bailed-out banks
To view several art-rich banks, click here.
Paul Smalera
The Big Money
Photo: Foster and Partners
It is difficult to fathom at first why a famous architect with one of the largest practices in the world would personally want to take on a sliver of a building on the Bowery.
This is Norman Foster, after all, who redesigned the Reichstag in Berlin and the British Museum and created Beijing’s new airport. He has already made his mark on Manhattan, with the bold Hearst Building on Eighth Avenue at 57th Street, and has also designed three other major projects not yet under construction: the expansion of the main branch of the New York Public Library, Tower 2 at the World Trade Center site and Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.
But architects often say the possibilities of a building lie in its limitations, and Mr. Foster was drawn to the challenge of designing what is essentially a vertical art gallery on New York City’s former skid row, a landscape dominated by restaurant supply stores. The building, at 257 Bowery, just south of Houston Street and one block away from the New Museum of Contemporary Art, will be the new Lower East Side home for Sperone Westwater. The gallery, now on West 13th Street in the West Village, represents artists like Bruce Nauman, Richard Long, Guillermo Kuitca and William Wegman. At its new address it will rise eight stories on a site of just 25 by 100 feet.
Robin Pogrebin
New York Times
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Nancy Spero, an American artist and feminist whose tough, exquisite figurative art addressed the realities of political violence, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 83 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was infection leading to respiratory problems that in turn caused heart failure, said her son Philip.
Born in Cleveland in 1926, Ms. Spero studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and there met her husband, the painter Leon Golub, to whom she was married for 53 years until his death, in 2004.
Holland Cotter
New York Times
Maggies Centre, Hammersmith, west London (Photo: Richard Bryant/Arcaid)
Lord Rogers last night won the £20,000 Stirling Prize, the premier award in British architecture, for his design of a cancer support centre.
The prize comes as a ringing endorsement from his peers despite Rogers being bumped off the £1 billion Chelsea Barracks redevelopment project by the intervention of Prince Charles. His victory — for the Maggie’s Centre in Hammersmith, west London — came as a surprise. The favourite for the award had been an art gallery on a Danish island by minimalist architect Tony Fretton.
Hugh Pearman
Times Online
