Category: visual

“Newly deposed Arab dictators might have been well advised to have paid attention to the works of their home-grown artists more closely: Many visualized the revolutions in their countries long before they happened.”

“Some of the most widely disliked buildings in Britain, so called ‘concrete brutalist’ structures of the 60s and 70s, including a bus station in Preston, a library in Birmingham, and parts of the South Bank centre in London, have been listed among the world’s most endangered treasures.”

Jonathan Glancey: “These are fine civic buildings and with a little imagination and care they could continue to serve and even delight [sic] future generations. I once described Preston bus station as baroque – modern baroque – and I stand by that.”

“More than 10,000 items in the Walters Art Museum … can now be viewed and downloaded online for free, without copyright restrictions. The museum’s collection is ‘basically public domain,’ said [the Walters’s] manager of web and social media.

“A dazzling €44 million (£37.7m) arts centre” – designed by Oscar Niemeyer – “in the northern Spanish city of Avilés is to close [for at least 60 days] after six months amid political squabbling as the country asks itself what to do with a glut of glittering new museums.”

“As Los Angeles’ graffiti problem escalates, the city’s reputation as the mural capital of the world is in jeopardy as its famous wall pieces are disappearing under a sea of spray paint. They are being targeted by vandals who flout the long accepted code that they are off limits for tagging.”

Christopher Knight on John McLaughlin: “He was mostly self-taught, but [his] unprecedented work marks the beginning of great postwar art in Los Angeles. … [His] paintings are pure, clean abstractions. Forget fractured space, tortured figures and portentous gloom.”

“The late abstractions, painted when de Kooning suffered from dementia … [have] been denigrated for years because of his diminished mental and physical state during the 1980s. Many wondered how an artist who had lost his short-term memory, had difficulty writing, and could no longer sign his name could complete 26 paintings in 1987. See for yourself.”

“According to a municipal official, the architects – Bracha and Michael Chyutin – threatened to resign Monday over differences with the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, which sponsored and financed the project. ‘The [Wiesenthal] Center drove the architects crazy. It asked for daily briefings and nagged them to death,’ the official said.”

Michael Kimmelman: “Following up on my review last week of Via Verde, a groundbreaking green housing project soon to be completed in the Melrose section of the South Bronx, I took a walk around that neighborhood with Amanda M. Burden, director the Department of City Planning under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.”