A Family Feud and a Locked-Away Klimt Masterpiece in Brussels Cause Friction, Research Suggest Looking at Real Art is Good for Our Brains: Morning Links for October 3, 2024

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The Headlines

MYSTERY KLIMT MANSION DISPUTE. Will the public soon be allowed to visit the mysterious Palais Stoclet mansion in Brussels? The sumptuous Unesco heritage site designed by Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann, is graced by an original Gustav Klimt mosaic frieze, The Tree of Life (1905-1911). However, the property has been closed to the public since its last resident died in 2002. Seven descendants of Adolphe Stoclet, the industrial magnate who built the mansion in 1910 — and their eight lawyers — are fighting over what to do with the building, and have banned public access to it. But a new, government-sponsored digital model of the palais based on public-domain archives, created by university professor and architect David Lo Buglio, offers a virtual glimpse of the masterpiece, reports The Wall Street Journal. The virtual tour currently on view in a Brussels gallery didn’t come without a fight, though, and Lo Buglio received several threatening legal missives from the Stoclet heirs, claiming the model violated their privacy and intellectual property rights. Never mind that the building has received over €1 million ($1.1 million) in public funds to maintain it, thanks to its Unesco status. Meanwhile, a new law has required all Unesco-listed sites to open for few days each year, though action on that is pending due to unrelated, local political wrangling. 

NOTHING LIKE THE REAL THING, PROVES SCIENCE. Speaking of virtual experiences, scientists in Holland have demonstrated that the real thing is a whole lot better. A neurological study has shown that physical artworks experienced in person stimulate the brain ten times more than looking at an image on a poster, reports The Guardian. The study commissioned by the Mauritshuis Museum in The Haugue used eye-tracking tech and MRI scans to record brain activity on 20 volunteers while they looked at genuine, versus reproduced artworks. “You become [mentally] richer when you see things, whether you are conscious of it or not, because you make connections in your brain,” said Martine Gosselink, director of the Mauritshuis.

The Digest

Environmental activists, who glued themselves to the frame of J.M.W. Turner’s painting Tomson’s Aeolian Harp (1809) at Manchester Art Gallery in 2022, were acquitted yesterday. The Just Stop Oil members also wrote the words “No New Oil” on the floor with chalk, but did not attempt to throw anything directly onto the surface of the painting, unlike fellow activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland, who just received jail sentences for throwing soup over a Van Gogh painting in 2022. [The Art Newspaper]

Hauser & Wirth will now represent Jeffrey Gibson, who this year did the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, marking the first time an Indigenous artist received that honor solo. [ARTnews]

The Musé du Quai Branly in Paris has apologized and promised to correct labels and texts which omit the term “Tibet,” and replace it with the Chinese government-preferred term, “Xizang.” The response comes amid allegations that the institution was caving to Chinese pressure by erasing Tibetan cultural denominations. Similar accusations have been launched at the Musée Guimet in Paris. [Hyperallergic]

Oops! A museum technician accidentally threw away an artwork by Alexandre Lavet at Holland’s LAM museum because he thought it was trash. Museum officials were able to recover the undamaged sculpture and were understanding about the mistake. After all, the Lavet piece, All the good times we spent together (2016) is meant to look like trash. It comprises two perfectly replicated, hand-painted, and crushed cans of beer. [Artnet News]

The Kicker

REFUSING TO IMITATE. The US critic and filmmaker Henry Louis Gates Jr., who sat for Kerry James Marshall’s first commissioned portrait, talks to Frieze Magazine about his favorite authors, museums, and a life seeped in the arts. The Smithsonian was the first museum he ever visited as a boy, and “it was better than Walt Disney’s Fantasyland, man,” he remembers. But he was later heartbroken to read a Washington Post report a few years ago, stating inner-city Black kids said visiting the Smithsonian as a “white” activity. Later, answering questions about quotes he lives by, Louis Gates Jr offered this gem by Samuel Johnson: “’Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.’ That is so relevant to Black history,” he said.