This week’s links are of an art-historical bent with added international flavour, from a contemporary Japanese artist at Versailles to a vital Canadian question on what our contemporary art history actually is in the first place.
Takashi Murakami, Kaikai Kiki. Photo: Gilles Truyens © EPV (source: design-milk.com)
What are the “great” Canadian exhibitions of the past 30 years?: Gabrielle Moser reports from curator Kitty Scott’s talk on Betty Goodwin at the AGO with Scott’s concern that most people would struggle to identify six or seven group exhibitions by a Canadian curator that have contributed significant new knowledge in visual art over the last few decades. It’s a challenge that gives me (and Gabby) considerable pause, and is well worth investigating.
Hide/Seek in the American portrait: MAN’s Tyler Green praises Hide/Seek at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery for intelligently proving that the representation of difference and diversity - sexual, and otherwise - has always been and should remain a central theme of American art and culture.
Murakami Versailles: Two opinion columns at The Art Newspaper draw on the same extant facts of the matter to support their diverging opinions on Takashi Murakami’s current installation at the Château de Versailles. While Frédéric Bonnet argues that Murakami’s superflat aesthetic simply can’t compete with the existing Rococo splendour of Versailles, Joan DeJean believes that this profusion of overkill-upon-overkill is in keeping with the Château’s historical purpose.
Also in The Art Newspaper this week, the Cincinnati Art Museum may not have realized their vision of commissioning a portrait of Grace Jones to be installed alongside Thomas Gainsborough’s 1760 portrait of Ann Ford, but painter Kehinde Wiley is still very much interested. So am I - it would be ridiculously awesome if it happened.
The Victorian Undead (via C-Monster): Not recommended for the easily disturbed, but this selection of post-mortem Victorian portraits in which the deceased is posed as though still alive takes the uncanny to the sort of deep valley I really could have done without visiting. I actually can’t decide which is worse: in the post’s own words, “eyes either held open by some unknown mechanism (shudder) or with pupils painted over closed eyes, to very, very creepy effect.”
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