Category: visual

“The suits do not specify damages, nor do they list specific sales of art by California residents. Rather, as Eric George, the lawyer who filed them, explained, the complaints seek to force the auction houses to reveal the identities or locations of sellers: information that is often kept secret.”

“The initiative to create new, large spaces for modern art is a wave that is comparable with the development in regional theater that took place here in the 1960s. These museums are a recognition that the visual arts and artists in this country are stronger than they have ever been.”

“Plans for ‘vertical forests’ – 25-floor buildings, flecked with balconies full of bushes and small trees – are sprouting up in several European countries. Fittingly, Milan, the continent’s design capital but also one of western Europe’s most polluted cities, is leading the way with the construction of two green towers.”

“A sharp-edged plastic roof oversails the college like the shimmering wing of a Jumbo jet, and the drum of its new concert hall suggests a vast, wooden-ribbed turbo-fan.”

“There is a growing anxiety that Britain’s illustrious creative record is being imperilled by funding changes that could deter poorer students and put courses at risk. The numbers are stark. While application deadlines for 2012 are not until January, the latest Ucas figures show a 27% decline in applications for creative art and design courses compared with this time last year.”

Former Royal Scottish National Orchestra cellist David Edwards gave up his music career for a life fitting out dollhouses.

As a massive Leonardo da Vinci show opens at the National Gallery in London, people in the UK can watch a tour of the show in cinema houses – or in their own living rooms. “The appeal of these broadcasts is surely the sense of a great national occasion,” says Jonathan Jones.

What do you get when you combine film director David Lynch with a bunch of mathematicians and artists to stage a Parisian art exhibit? “A typically unsettling design” – an exhibit that’s “terrifically engaging and utterly disorienting.”

From the locked-out Sotheby’s handlers to young art historians facing life with no tenure, here’s Hyperallergic’s annual list of the art world’s 99 percent.

“Excellence is not in the object, and it’s not us. Where is it?” Artist and art critic Franklin Einspruch offers a few answers – including “Excellence is art’s reproductive drive.”