Category: visual

“How do you turn a 100-metre-tall incinerator in the heart of Copenhagen into a social and cultural hub? By building a ski slope on the roof, of course. The unlikely combination of green energy and alpine sport was the winning bid in a competition to design a new waste-to-energy plant.”

“Strange hieroglyphs and representations of Egyptian gods and goddesses have been found in the middle of the Po valley in northern Italy, revealing a unique example of Egyptomania.”

“Visiting a national park in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, award-winning photographer [David] Slater left his camera unattended for a while. It soon attracted the attention of an inquisitive female from a local group of crested black macaque monkeys, known for their intelligence and dexterity.”

“The Detroit Institute of Arts has installed nearly 80 high-quality, life-size reproductions of some of its greatest paintings in 11 cities in southeastern Michigan. In its second year, the Inside/Out initiative is bringing a taste of the DIA to the masses where they live, work, shop and play. DIA leaders hope to woo new visitors downtown to visit the original paintings once they’ve seen the copies in their own backyard.”

“What Gehry, evergreen at 82, has been building up there on the site of a former parking lot on the border of New York’s financial district, close by Brooklyn Bridge, is an $875m (£543.3m), 870ft, 76-storey residential tower, clad in heroic, sculpted folds of stainless steel. It houses 903 rental apartments – none are for sale – with prices ranging upwards of $2,630 a month, and is due for completion in five months’ time.”

“Almost perversely, as soon as the American art world exploded in the sixties, with Twombly positioned near the center of it all, he left America for good. By the turn of the millennium, he hadn’t had a New York gallery show in almost 30 years. His work grew to seem exotic and once-removed.”

“As technologies have changed, however, a former totalitarian standby has fallen out of favor: the propaganda poster. Communist China viewed through decades of propaganda posters was a uniformly cheerful and confident nation.” (Sample title: “Tempering Red Hearts in Stormy Waves”)

Citing Kimmelman as “one of the paper’s great writers”, Jonathan Landman, deputy managing editor, wrote how Kimmelman started at the paper of record as a music critic and “swiftly morphed into an art critic.” And now after four years as a foreign correspondent, he will fill out his all-purpose critic portfolio as architecture critic.

“For the last couple of decades, contemporary art has flourished through an alliance of the rich and the not-so-rich. It is the same educated, probably public-sector-employed middle class (many of whom marched this week) that enthusiastically visit galleries and art fairs. It is these fans of modern art who have helped, by their acclaim, to generate the charisma that makes it apparently worth so many millions.”