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Why should the public care about museums? Met director Phillipe de Montebello takes a whack at an answer: “The fact is, in the rooms of our museums are preserved things that are far more than just pretty pictures. These works of art, embodying and expressing with graphic force the deepest aspirations of a time and place, are direct, primary evidence for the study and understanding of mankind.”

The Barnes move to Philadelphia is a coup for the city. Pew Trusts president Rebecca Rimmel: “We had two primary objectives: to make sure the foundation was on secure financial footing and to make sure the art and the education programs were accessible. We could have just given money to solve the first problem, but that would have done nothing for the second…. This is a public asset, something to make Philadelphia even more paramount in art.”

Record auction prices for Canadian art fuel a brisk market for the resale of Canadian paintings.

“Few famous architects had sullied their hands with stadiums before Herzog and de Meuron did so in Basle (for the club they support, FC Basle) and Munich. They are still building Beijing’s Olympic Stadium for the 2008 Games. All this signals a new era: stadiums are becoming keynote urban buildings, as cathedrals were in the Middle Ages and opera houses more recently. When Norman Foster’s new Wembley opens in 2006, it will be his first stadium in more than 40 years in architecture.”

An electronic brush promises to give artists more control of their digital work. “Unlike other painting programs that allow artists to pick up colors from a limited computer palette, I/O Brush lets people paint with colors and textures that might come from, for instance, a piece of fruit, a favorite shirt, a memento from a trip, a teddy bear or garden flowers. The brush contains a microphone, a miniature video camera, and sensors and is wired to a computer that runs a touch screen. An artist picks up “ink” from her environment by lightly brushing over the desired object.”

“Almost all political leaders find themselves using architects for political purposes. It is a relationship that appeals to egotists of every description. That is why there are photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, Tony Blair and François Mitterrand and the first President Bush – as well as countless mayors and archbishops, chief executives and billionaire robber barons – each bowed over their own, equally elaborate architectural models looking just as narcissistically transfixed as the beatific Saddam beaming over his mosque.”