March 27, 2023
Good morning. ⛅ The ongoing Johannes Vermeer retrospective at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum is emerging as the blockbuster of all blockbusters. The show sold out within days of its opening and people have been bidding hundreds on secondary market tickets on eBay. We have this story for you today.
Also: The fourth episode of the Hirshhorn Museum's reality TV show is a snooze, a new art heist movie starring Willem Dafoe might be worse, and images of Michelangelo's "David" are apparently too offensive for a Florida school.
And remember that famous Renaissance portrait of the “Ugly Duchess”? Well, a new exhibition claims that the unlucky duchess was most likely a man.
— Hakim Bishara, Senior Editor
Tickets to Sold-Out Vermeer Show Are Going for Hundreds
The online resale market for the Rijksmuseum’s smash exhibition is booming, with tickets selling on eBay for over $2K. | Hakim Bishara
SPONSORED
Miniature Worlds: Joseph Cornell, Ray Johnson, Yayoi Kusama
Through small-scale works, this exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art in New York examines Cornell’s prominent role in the lives and careers of Johnson and Kusama. Learn more.
THE LATEST
Detail of Quinten Massys, “The Ugly Duchess (An Old Woman)” (1513) (image via Wikimedia Commons)
A curator at London’s National Gallery believes Quinten Massys’s 1513 painting may have been portraying a man all along.
Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print, “The Great Wave,” breaks records at auction, selling for nearly $2.8 million this week.
A Florida principal is pressured to resign after parents complained that an art teacher had shown Michelangelo’s “David” to their sixth graders.
SPONSORED
NYU Steinhardt Opens 2023 MFA Thesis Exhibitions
Taking place at 80WSE Gallery in New York’s Greenwich Village, Part I is on view from late March through April while Part II opens in May. Learn more.
ART ON SCREEN
They Managed to Mess Up an Art Heist Movie
There must be a lesson in Vasilis Katsoupis’s film Inside about the vacuousness of the art market or the claustrophobia of exhibition spaces — I just don’t care. | Valentina Di Liscia
MTV’s The Exhibit Is Back With an Inflatable Dolphin
Episode four, in which artists tackled themes of justice and injustice, was the most lifeless of the reality TV show so far. | Rhea Nayyar
MORE ON HYPERALLERGIC
Ten Painful Stories of the Dutch Colonial Slave Trade
The Rijksmuseum’s traveling show strives to remind us that we are all, in some way, a part of this chapter of human history, whose legacy continues today. | AX Mina
Textured Histories at Shiprock Santa Fe
The Santa Fe gallery features Indigenous textiles and jewelry from the early 19th century to today. | Maria Manuela
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