Crystal Bridges, the Art Museum Walmart Money Built – Review – NYTimes.com

By just about any measure, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, which opened last month in this small town in northwest Arkansas, is off to a running start. The dream-come-true of Alice Walton, an heir to the Walmart fortune, it is characterized by people both inside and outside the museum as a work in …

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Art and the Limits of Neuroscience – NYTimes.com

What is art? What does art reveal about human nature? The trend these days is to approach such questions in the key of neuroscience.

“Neuroaesthetics” is a term that has been coined to refer to the project of studying art using the methods of neuroscience. It would be fair to say that neuroaesthetics has become a …

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Federal Inquiry Into Possible Forging of Modernist Art – NYTimes.com

Federal authorities are investigating whether a parade of paintings and drawings, sold for years by some of New York’s most elite art dealers as the work of Modernist masters like Robert Motherwell and Jackson Pollock, actually consists of …

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Diego Rivera: Troublemaker : The New Yorker

In his review of the current Diego Rivera show at MOMA, Peter Schjeldahl discusses the “fracas” that surrounded the murals Rivera created for the RCA Building in Rockefeller

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The art market: Financial machinations at auctions | The Economist

WITH so many economies teetering on the brink of double-dip recession, it is hard to understand how the art market …

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Outsider art: How important is intent in art? | The Economist

JAMES BRETT, the founder and curator of “The Museum of Everything”, believes his two new shows are “the most important in Britain”. This might seem like a bold claim, particularly as one exhibition is tucked in the …

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A Fake Warhol? Foundation Isn’t Sure – WSJ.com

How can you tell if an Andy Warhol silkscreen is the real thing or a fake? Even the Pop master’s own art foundation has given up trying to tell the difference.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts said Wednesday that in coming months it plans to shut down its authentication board—the only independent arbiter of the legitimacy of Warhol works that turn up on the art market.

The six members of the authentication board, which include museum curators from …

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Peter Schjeldahl on Degas: Audio Slide Show : The New Yorker

This week in the magazine, Peter Schjeldahl writes about “Degas and the Nude,” a “wonderful show and a weird show” at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. “Degas seems to create his women, as if they were all Eves—even a chubby prostitute scratching her …

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Southern California Stakes Its Claim as World Art Center – NYTimes.com

For the next six months, Southern California will be awash in celebrations of Southern California art: close to 170 separate exhibitions at 130 museums and galleries stretching from San Diego to Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. Pacific Standard Time, as this festival is known, is an exhaustive accounting of the birth of …

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Air and Space Museum closes after guards clash with protesters – Post Now – The Washington Post

The Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum on the Mall was abruptly closed Saturday afternoon after a “large group of protesters” tried to push past security guards and enter the museum, a spokeswoman said.

At least one demonstrator was pepper-sprayed by a museum guard in the confrontation, said Smithsonian spokeswoman Linda St. Thomas. Several witnesses

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Los Angeles County Museum Moves a 340-Ton Rock – NYTimes.com

It is just under 60 miles from the Stone Valley Quarry here — an expanse of dust, boulders, roaring bulldozers and cut granite hillsides — to the lush campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art on Museum Mile. Behind a pile of rocks the other afternoon, out of sight from the road, workers scurried around a 340-ton, 21-foot-high solid granite boulder, trussed with red steel girders, gleaming under the …

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Dylan Paintings Draw Scrutiny – NYTimes.com

The freewheeling artistic style of Bob Dylan, who has drawn on a variety of sources in creating his music and has previously raised questions of attribution in his work, is once again stirring debate — this time over an …

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