I’m going back to when Persia faced her greatest threat – the greatest conqueror the world had ever known, Genghis Khan. But from death and destruction emerged a golden age. Samira Ahmed, Art of Persia III
If eye-witness accounts are to be believed, up to a million men, women and children were butchered this way. ibid.
Africa: one of the fastest growing regions in the world. The youngest continent where six in ten people are under twenty-five. With hundreds of different ethnicities and some 2,000 languages, Africa is the most culturally diverse place on Earth. African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power I: Ethiopia, BBC 2020
Axum: 120 obelisks … an elaborate feat of engineering. ibid.
This is Afewerk Tekle’s famous Triptych, the Total Liberation of Africa, and it’s awe-inspiring. ibid.
A thriving fashion and contemporary arts scene. ibid.
Senegal: It has a cultural influence far beyond its size with a dynamic film, fashion and hip-hop scene. Here the struggles for liberation from the slave trade and from French rule in the 20th century created heroes and leaders who redefined what Africa is. African Renaissance: When Art Meets Power II: Senegal
The very walls of Dakar are evidence of people challenging prevailing ideas and expressing their cultural feeling. ibid.
In June last year I got a tip-off from a reliable source promising to take me on a journey to recover painting stolen from the world’s biggest art theft, works that so far have been missing for thirty years. Thirteen works of art including three Rembrandts and a Vermeer were stolen. Their value is now estimated at around $1 billion. The Billion Dollar Art Hunt, John Wilson reporting, BBC 2020
Does a violent Irish gangsta hold the solution to a thirty-year mystery? ibid.
Boston St Patrick’s Day 1990 when two men approach the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, the finest in Boston, just after midnight … The two thieves in Boston stayed allegedly 81 minutes to chose their pieces. ibid.
When one thinks of the Impressionists, one thinks of Paris or northern France. Not the gardens and landscapes of Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. But there is a story to be told of American artists learning from a movement in Europe but making it very much their own, and very much reflective of America that at the end of the nineteenth century was undergoing enormous change. The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism, Gillian Anderson, Sky Arts 2020
The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement was an exhibition that originated at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and then travelled to here: the Connecticut Florence Griswold Museum. ibid.
What brings them together is their interests in gardens and painting outdoors. ibid. Anna O Marley, curator Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
Are we more offended more than ever these days? Are artists and writers running scared? Is creative risk too risky? Is artistic licence too easily cancelled? Offended by Irvine Walsh, Sky Arts 2020
If it provokes a single thought, isn’t that what Art is for? ibid.
Silence is inertia. It’s death. It means we’ve given up on the dynamic that progresses humanity. ibid.
In Britain, Art has rarely enraged public opinion more than the Sensation exhibition. It propelled the Chapman brothers as part of a superstar generation of British artists to global infamy. ibid.
The front line: Art offended the over-sensitive in the 20th century but now comedy is the battle-ground. ibid.
Have people got the right to be offended? … ‘It doesn’t mean that you have the right to change the whole world to cater to your own particular sensibilities.’ ibid. Andrew Doyle
‘Artists only work for corporations now.’ ibid. M.I.A.
No-one wants to be fooled. People are fooled by art much more than we know. The director at the Metropolitan museum was once asked, How many fakes do you think could possibly be on the walls? To which he responded, I have no idea. It’s embarrassing. Worse than that, I think, is that they don’t want to own up. Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art, Freedman, Netflix 2021
‘I Am the Central Victim’: Art Dealer Ann Freedman on Selling $63 Million in Fake Paintings. ibid. online article James Panero 27th August 2013
It started with the news of Knoedler closing. And that was shocking because Knoedler was very old-guard institution in the art world. And nobody really knew the details of that until you know, news started leaking out about this forgery scandal. ibid. M H Miler, The New York Times
A con that went on for nearly twenty years. ibid. Patricia Cohen, The New York Times
None of the works Rosales brought to the gallery were in the catalogues raisonnés of the artists. ibid. Luke Nikas, Freeman’s lawyer
‘A 75-year-old artist [Pei-Shen Qian] who went from selling his paintings for a couple of hundred dollars to selling them for millions.’ ibid. television presenter
‘I firmly refute the accusations that I misled anyone concerning this transaction. I believed in the authenticity of the Pollock at the time [of sale] and continue to do so.’ ibid. Ann Freedman, The Financial Times 9 December 2011
Florence was also a cauldron of creativity. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance: Birth of a Dynasty I, PBS 2004
The Medici would protect and pay for the greatest artists and thinkers of their age: Michelangelo et al. ibid.
The Medici: godfathers of the Renaissance. ibid.
The Council brought together the greatest mix of thinkers, artists, merchants, and churchmen that the world had ever seen. ibid.
By the mid-15th century the Medici family had fought their way to power in Florence. They had dictated the taste of the city, presiding over a revolution in Western culture – the Renaissance. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance II: The Magnificent Medici
The greatest artists the world had ever seen. ibid.
He was an artist who would take the world apart ... Leonardo da Vinci. ibid.
Lorenzo decided to bring Michelangelo into his family. ibid.
Under Lorenzo, Florence had reached new heights of culture and sophistication. ibid.
[Sandro] Botticelli ... hurled his own paintings into the flames ... The Bonfire of the Vanities. ibid.
Fifteen years earlier the sculptor had been adopted into the greatest family in Florence. Michelangelo had moved in with the Medici. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance III: The Medici Popes
They had begun to procure corpses from the city’s hospitals for ‘private research’. The pioneer of this controversial method was the city’s most talked about personality – Leonardo da Vinci. ibid.
Michelangelo’s fresco was declared indecent. Empires Special: Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance IV: Power v Truth
They had been the patrons of genius. Renaissance men who had changed the Western world. In their name daring new artists had created the greatest works of the Italian Renaissance. ibid.
In October 2018 the anonymous street artist known as Banksy published this video online. In it he can be seen preparing a custom frame for his panting, Girl with Balloon. The painting is about to be offered for sale at Sotherby’s. Banksy & the Rise of Outlaw Art, Sky Arts 2021
As the hammer struck, the work started to fall through the frame, and as it did it shredded, and everyone witnessed in horror as it was destroyed. It caused a huge stir. ibid.
Painting, or bombing, the New York subway system soon became the primary focus for young graffiti writers obsessed with having their name seen as widely as possible. The nascent art movement developed it own grammar, rules and culture. ibid.
In the summer of 1989 the British Transport Police launched a series of raids to arrest Bristol’s most infamous graffiti artists. The raids were the culmination of Operation Anderson: a year-long investigation into Barton Hill: the biggest anti-Graffiti operation ever to be undertaken in the UK. ibid.
Basquiat and Keith Haring were really the beginning of street art, modern street art. ibid.
For Banksy, there was no influence more important than the French stencil artists: Blek le Rat. Blek, who had first encountered graffiti on a trip to New York, adapted the idea of street art to the European tradition, stencilling political statements on walls … 1981: stencils of rats started to appear in Paris. ibid.