Category: visual

“While slightly fewer people went to the museums, they seemed to be spending, according to the Smithsonian. Its business division, Smithsonian Enterprises had its 5th year of net growth, said Clough, and returned $29 million to the Smithsonian private accounts. The most successful units of the division are retail, then media and consumer products.”

“A long-delayed project to build three colossal museums” – including branches of the Guggenheim and the Louvre – “on an arid Persian Gulf island will be finished by 2017, officials say, realizing the designs of some of the world’s leading architects while underlining the ambitions of this city to emerge as a global capital.”

Fu Baoshi (1904-1965) practiced and developed the art of traditional Chinese landscape painting through war, occupation, revolution and the reign of Mao Zedong, when merely putting brush to paper was a political act.

Those wings are architectural, not angelic. “Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room. … The winged shape of the building appears to be unique in the Roman Empire.”

“The find is Bathonea, a substantial harbor town dating from the second century B.C. Discovered in 2007 after a drought lowered the lake’s water table, it has been yielding a trove of relics from the fourth to the sixth centuries A.D., a period that parallels Istanbul’s founding and its rise as Constantinople.”

“Madrid’s Prado Museum has started opening seven days a week and will lengthen its highly visited special exhibitions to offset the pain of government cutbacks. Despite enjoying record attendance, the [museum] is feeling the blow of a 6 million euro ($7.75 million) subsidy cut as Spain tries to rein in its swollen deficit.”

“It’s just such an awful building that the only reason to keep it would be as a monument to stupidity,” said Mark Wigley, the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

“Never has street art been so romanticised and the artists’ works so highly sought-after.”

London’s sites aren’t the only ones in danger of losing their heritage: In Seville, “the half-built Pelli tower is casting a growing shadow across one of the country’s most-visited cities and over a cluster of 13th-century buildings which have been designated a world heritage site by Unesco.”