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“With 120 art galleries in a town of 4,058 people, or one gallery for every 34 residents, the city council of Carmel-by-the-Sea voted last month to limit the number of new galleries moving into town. Carmel’s leaders decided that the city, which earns no sales-tax revenue when out-of-state tourists snap up a watercolor, has reached aesthetic overkill.”

“It has long been known that classical statues were painted. Indeed, their creators sometimes chose different kinds of stone for different parts of their statues according to the way they reacted to paint and wax, using types that could be highly polished for the fleshy parts and coarser varieties that would absorb paint for the drapery. Some art history books have included coloured photographs to give an idea of how the statues of the Greeks and Romans would have looked to contemporaries. But I Colori del Bianco (The Colours of White) is the first show to confront us with three-dimensional copies created with the help of meticulous scientific investigation.”

“The past year or two has seen a total and astonishing reversal in the reputation of modernist architects. These days, who but the most blinkered retired actor would refer to Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre as Treblinka? The once mocked and scorned Colin St John Wilson has become a national treasure, knighted by the Queen, whose scion once reviled Wilson’s British Library building as resembling an academy for secret police. How come this change of heart?”

Much of the Afghan art missing after the American invasion has been surfacing. “The bulk of the newly inventoried items were found in April 2003 when a presidential palace vault in Kabul was cracked open to reveal a trove of famed, intact Bactrian gold pieces. But many more artifacts, including giant Buddhist sculptures and ancient ivory statues, have been found in recent months in unmarked boxes and safes stashed for safekeeping during the Soviet-led coup and then during the years of hard-line Taliban rule.”

“After a period in which strongly sculpted museum buildings have dominated, often upstaging their contents, Taniguchi’s MoMA represents a return to the time-honored way of housing art in lofty rectangular rooms. Because it looks so coolly cerebral, it is hard to imagine people making pilgrimages just to see the architecture, as they do with Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain. Taniguchi’s exquisite white-walled spaces are so understated that they verge on invisible, which is exactly what MoMA wanted. The art remains the main draw. The architecture merely provides the frame.”