Brandeis University has decided to sell the 6,000 piece art collection of the Rose Art Museum. Later articles seem to suggest that the museum is going to close but not sell the art. OK.

The University’s budget crises leaves it $10 million in the hole. The museum is known for its collection of American artists such as Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein.

In The New York Times, an amusing article on the placement of the feet of animals in art. In more than half the pictures studied, the artists got it wrong.

“The researchers found, for example, that a skeleton of a dog at a Finnish museum depicts the right hindleg in a rearward position while the right foreleg is lifted and moving forward. In a proper depiction the hindleg would be forward too, having moved before the foreleg.”

Once upon a time, artists thought horses ran like this:

An excerpt from a new book on the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. He was a louse.

One of the the things I have often heard from others when discussing Rimbaud is the assumption that without his indulging his wilder side, Rimbaud would not have produced great work. With no alternate universe Rimbaud for comparison, we’ll never know.

As it is, the world got a guy who wrote great poetry at 17, and then chucked art at the age of 22. (more…)