How Capitalism Can Save Art – WSJ.com

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

Warhol grew up in industrial Pittsburgh. Today’s college-bound rarely have direct contact with the manual trades.

Yet work of bold originality and stunning beauty continues to be done in …

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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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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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Degas and the ballet: On your toes | The Economist

“DEGAS and the Ballet”—now there’s an exhibition title to put a person off. It just screams of being an inevitable blockbuster, and who wants to feel like a lemming? I planned to skip the show, which opens at the Royal Academy 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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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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