News from the art world
The Utah monolith
A strange metal monolith was discovered in the Utah desert by a helicopter crew last week, said BBC News. Wildlife officials spotted the object while conducting an aerial search for bighorn sheep in the remote Red Rock desert, and landed to take a closer look. It turned out to be a rectangular metal shaft, standing around 11ft tall and planted firmly in a canyon. There was no indication as to how it got there, and no clear explanation has yet been offered. Internet sleuths studying Google Earth have discovered that it has been in place since 2016. Theories range from “extraterrestrial visitation to avant-garde installation”, to a homage to the monoliths in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, said The Art Newspaper. It was perhaps influenced by the sculptures of the artist John McCracken, who lived in nearby New Mexico, and died in 2011. But almost as mysteriously as it appeared, the monolith disappeared, said The Guardian. Adventurers who drove to the remote site to take pictures last Friday found it gone. “All that was left in its place was a message written in the dirt that said ‘bye bitch’ with a fresh pee stain right next to it,” said one of the visitors, Riccardo Marino. Before arriving, he had seen a pickup truck carrying a large object travelling in the opposite direction.
Michelangelo’s graffiti
A graffito etched into the walls of Florence’s town hall that has “puzzled passers-by for centuries” may be the work of Michelangelo, said Nick Squires in The Daily Telegraph. Depicting a man’s face in profile, the carving on the facade of the city’s Palazzo Vecchio has long “inspired legends as to its origins”, and is thought to date from the turn of the 16th century, around the time that Michelangelo lived in Florence (1499-1504). Yet US-based museum curator Adriano Marinazzo now believes that he has solved the mystery. While researching a book, he noticed similarities between the graffito and a portrait of a man drawn by Michelangelo in Paris’s Louvre Museum. The figures in the two likenesses have similar features: “long Roman noses”, “weak chins” and “the same curly hair”. Marinazzo thinks it may depict Francesco Granacci, an artistic contemporary and friend of Michelangelo. The curator argues that the graffito couldn’t be the work of vandals, said Brian Boucher on Artnet News. The Palazzo Vecchio would have been heavily guarded, so its creator must have had some “official standing”. “Who would ever say that it was by my hand?”, Michelangelo wrote next to the Louvre drawing. Marinazzo believes this is a cheeky hint linking picture and carving.