Art resources for teachers

Ursula von Rydingsvard discusses her large-scale sculpture Ona, which is permanently installed outside of Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York.

Currently in the last stages of construction after nearly 7 years of development, the Kelpies are a pair of gargantuan horse heads by public artist Andy Scott that now tower over the Forth & Clyde canal in Falkirk, Scotland. The sculptures measure some 30 meters tall (99 ft.) and are meant as a monument to the horse-powered heritage of Scotland.

Francis Bacon's three-panelled painting Three Studies of Lucian Freud has become the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, soaring to US$142.4m at Christie's.

The 1969 triptych, never before offered at auction, had carried a pre-sale estimate of about $85m. In the end it easily eclipsed the $119.9m price of Edvard Munch's The Scream, achieved in May 2012 year at Sotheby's. The previous record for a Bacon work of art was $86.3m set in 2008.

Time destroys fakes by revealing features of the era—the climate of taste—in which they were made.

British street artist Banksy has spent the month of October tagging up the walls of New York City as part of his self-launched “Better Out Than In” residency. It’s one of his boldest outings yet, and while it’s put a feather (possibly spray-painted on) in the cap of the world’s most famous graffiti practitioner, Banksy has been putting out very complicated works for years now. 

Over the past two years, I’ve had an opportunity to immerse myself in the thorny relationship between aesthetics, citizenship, and survival by producing a documentary series on the recently completed smARTpower program. An initiative of the USA the project sent eighteen artists to fifteen different countries to create community-based art projects with local artists and young people. The participating artists had less than two months to develop an artwork on the ground while also engaging in person-to-person diplomacy. smARTpower asks provocative questions about what a good work of art is, what art is good for, and for whom.

Made up of a small team of artists and documenters, ColourIkamva is a fairly new initiative that instils pride, possibility and responsibility in school children within Ikamva through working with them to transform their learning space, and help them envision plans for their futures. We have a chat to them about their project.

The legacy of Nazi war crimes resurfaced on Monday when a German magazine reported that a trove of artworks looted from Jewish collectors had been discovered in a Munich apartment including masterpieces by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Paul Klee.

Has any political party in Western history had as vexed a relationship with art as the German National Socialists? The artistic proclivities of Hitler and company compel us, perhaps because they seem to promise a window into the mindset that resulted in such ultimate inhumanity. We can learn about the Nazis from the art they liked, but we can learn just as much (or more) from the art they disliked — or even that which they suppressed outright.

Cyclique is an installation of 256 white balloons filled with LEDs that flash in time with an audio track, creating patterns ranging from eerie to playful. The installation was created by audiovisual artist Bruno Ribeiro, also known as Nohista, and Collectif Coin for Nuit Blanche 2013.