ROBERT F. TOBLER
Activism
New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz staged a protest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, covering a sign for David H. Koch Plaza with a new one reading “Climate Change Denier Plaza.” [Jerry Saltz/Twitter]
Writer and artist Greg Allen has also conceived a performance work that would involve individuals taking turns blocking that signage. [Greg.org]
Museums
In other news from the Met, the museum will present “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” at its Anna Wintour Costume Center in May. A press event was held in Rome yesterday to discuss plans for the exhibition. [Vogue]
The Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery in the Hague in the Netherlands will take Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (1665) off view for two weeks to do scientific research on it. [The New York Times]
Market Machinations
Rachel Wetzler reviews Georgina Adam’s new book, Dark Side of the Boom: The Excesses of the Art Market in the Twenty-First Century, which looks at art and the ultra-rich and contains this quotation from veteran auctioneer Simon de Pury: “I know some Rothko buyers—some of the key market makers today—who didn’t know who Rothko was until he reached $40 million.” [The New Republic]
A mafia informant claims that a famed Caravaggio stolen from an oratory in Palermo, Italy, in 1969 was sold to a Swiss art dealer. The whole story is quite baroque. [The Art Newspaper]
The Spotlight
The late, great Abstract Expressionist Richard Pousette-Dart will have his first show in the United Kingdom at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. [The Art Newspaper]
Donald Trump
“Who should paint Donald Trump’s official portrait?” Artnet News asked. Art types answered, including Hank Willis Thomas, Adrian Piper, and Judith Bernstein, who suggested herself, saying that she would show the president “what he is: a fool, a monster, a jester, a sexist, a racist.” [Artnet News]
Virulent right-wing commentator Sean Hannity also had presidential portraiture on the mind, and shared a video of a Trump portrait by Jon McNaughton. “The ‘left’ loves art, and especially taxpayer funded art that is ‘provocative.’ Let’s get their reaction to this,” he wrote. [@SeanHannity/Twitter]
Potpourri
Here are photos of Morag Keil’s current show at Jenny’s in Los Angeles, which runs through March 3. [Contemporary Art Daily]
John McPhee, who has been writing nonfiction for the New Yorker since 1963, has a new piece in the magazine about bears in New Jersey. [The New Yorker]