Tag Archives: art

The Associated Press reports: Four men were charged Monday over the theft of an 18-carat gold toilet from Blenheim Palace, the sprawling English mansion where British wartime leader Winston Churchill was born. The toilet, valued at 4.8 million pounds ($5.95 million), was the work of Italian conceptual artist Maurizio Cattelan. It was part of an art installation at Blenheim Palace, …

CNN reports: US law enforcement officials recovered what appeared to be a Fabergé egg from a yacht seized from a Russian oligarch in Fiji, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Wednesday. The $300 million yacht, owned by sanctioned Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov, was sailed by US law enforcement officials from Fiji to the San Diego Bay late last month, where …

Jersey City Upfront reports: Spanish artist Jaume Plensa just unveiled his latest public work of art. Lefrak and Simon commissioned Plensa to create “Water’s Soul” — an 80-foot tall sculpture sitting on the edge of the newly constructed Newport Pier. The Newport sculpture is Plensa’s second major, permanent installation in the New York area. Another of his works — “Voices” …

The Associated Press reports: The artist who created the first paint-by-numbers pictures and helped turn the kits into an American sensation during the 1950s has died, his family confirmed. Dan Robbins’ son says his father died Monday in Sylvania, Ohio. He was 93. Robbins came up with the idea for paint-by-numbers photos in the 1940s while working for the Palmer …

The BBC reports: TV art historian and nun Sister Wendy Beckett has died at the age of 88, it has been announced. In the 1990s she became one of the most unlikely television stars. Emerging from her hermit-like existence in a caravan at a Carmelite convent in Norfolk, she hosted unscripted BBC shows from galleries across the world. Born in …

The Washington Post reports: The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities has added sweeping language to already approved grants requiring artists and arts organizations to avoid producing work that could be considered lewd, vulgar or political. In a rare step made after millions of dollars in public funding was approved last month, the local arts commision said it would …

The BBC reports: A stencil spray painting by elusive artist Banksy shredded itself after it was sold for more than £1m. The framed “Girl With Balloon”, one of the artist’s best known works, was auctioned by Sotheby’s in London. The piece which shows a girl reaching towards a heart-shaped balloon was the final work sold at the auction. However, moments …

Curbed New York reports: Nearly a year after it was first announced, New York City’s first official memorial dedicated to the LGBTQ community is set to debut in Hudson River Park. Governor Andrew Cuomo, along with City Council speaker Corey Johnson, Senator Brad Hoylman, and other elected officials, unveiled the monument, two years in the making, which is intended to …

The Washington Post reports: The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to “borrow” a painting by Vincent Van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters. Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With …

Via press release: On January 23, “Jerry Springer: The Opera,” a New Group production, will preview at the Pershing Square Signature Center, an off-Broadway venue. That morning, at 9:30 a.m., I will hold a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington D.C., raising objections to the play and the source of funding for the New Group. Regarding the …

The New York Daily News reports: It’s a four-story outdoor art installation that’s hard to ignore. Residents of the Lower East Side awoke Christmas morning to find an enormous penis painted on the side of a Broome St. apartment building — courtesy of a Swedish-born artist. “I have never heard so much laughter and seen so many happy faces behind …

In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Mike Huckabee manages to simultaneously defend the arts and heap insults on artists. He writes: Donald Trump wasn’t my first choice for president. I was. But he was my second choice, and I’m proud that I supported him. In tackling the federal budget, he faces a debt that has doubled to $20 trillion in …

Via press release from Catholic League president Bill Donohue: The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), National Public Radio (NPR), and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), are all subsidized by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). The Trump administration is right to propose a budget that completely guts these entities of federal funding. That …

The Arizona Republic reports: Artist Karen Fiorito knew backlash was bound to come. And it has. Commissioned by a downtown Phoenix art gallery in January to create a billboard art piece that would comment on President Donald Trump’s administration, Fiorito said what she had in mind was going to stir up a controversy. “Billboards are perfect because you don’t have …

DNA Info reports: This is some very public art. A statue of a completely naked Donald Trump mysteriously appeared on the south side of Union Square Park Thursday morning. The full-frontal sculpture of the Republican presidential candidate, which stood for at least two hours before being removed by the Parks Department around 1:20 p.m., featured realistic details such as an …

A World AIDS Day photo project titled When Dogs Heal launches this week in Chicago and New York City. Watch below as the Associated Press explains. The exhibit opens tomorrow at Chicago’s FLATS Studio and on Thursday at NYC’s LGBT Community Center.

So this happened in Boston: It’s nothing personal, says Ben Ewen-Campen, he just doesn’t think French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir is much of a painter. Monday, the Harvard postdoc joined some like-minded aesthetes for a playful protest outside the Museum of Fine Arts. The rally, which mostly bewildered passersby, was organized by Max Geller, creator of the Instagram account Renoir Sucks …

This hilarious Quizno’s ad has racked up nearly 800,000 views in the last few days, but not laughing are the organizers of Burning Man. The Reno Gazette-Journal reports: The toasted sandwich company published a parody video, “Out of the Maze and into the Playa,” on YouTube earlier this week, a day after the weeklong utopian arts celebration in Northern Nevada’s …

The Man burned in the Nevada desert on Saturday night. And so did something else. USA Today reports: Timothy Leary, the late father of LSD, was memorialized at Burning Man after a fantastic procession and burning of his ashes in the Black Rock Desert. It was a spectacle that not even he probably could have imagined, as actress Susan Sarandon …

A remote camera is slowing panning the playa at Burning Man, where dust storms occasionally will obscure your view. I imagine things will be more visually interesting after dark, but for now you can watch thousands of people navigate their bikes among the installations and art cars.  The Man burns tomorrow night and things wrap up for most on Monday.