Category: visual

They’re some of the most famous photos ever taken: the Vietnamese general firing his pistol at a handcuffed man’s head; the starving Sudanese girl being stalked by a buzzard; Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. “[The] about-to-die image draws us into the action, forcing us to complete the unfinished sequence we’ve been shown … We’re active participants whether we like it or not.”

“Google maintains that, beyond details you may not have noticed before, you can see things not normally visible to the human eye. And it is probably true. Still, the most unusual aspects of the experience are time, quiet and stasis: you can look from a seated position in the comfort of your own home or office cubicle, for as long as you want, without being jostled or blocked by other art lovers.”

“The painting, Heritage?, shows the Confederate battle flag superimposed on images that include a hanged black man and robed Ku Klux Klansmen, one with a torch.” The canvas was removed “after a poster on a Southern heritage website encouraged people to protest the [piece].”

“When the Denver Art Museum’s signature American Indian art galleries reopened last week after a seven-month overhaul, the biggest change … was in a less obvious place: the wall labels. For the first time many of the works on display are attributed to individual artists instead of just their tribes. It is a revolution in museum practice.”

The ‘Secrets of the Silk Road’ exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology – one of only three U.S. venues for the highly anticipated show, and the only one on the East Coast – “has been modified, and will open without artifacts and mummies from China, at the request of Chinese officials.”

“An agent for the Getty picked up the export license that seals the [$44.9 million] deal for Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino from the British culture ministry at the opening of business Thursday … With that, the museum cleared a hurdle it had tripped over in failed attempts to complete past high-profile purchases from Great Britain.”

“Looking repeatedly at the cloud studies, I’ve felt a lingering dissatisfaction with what I’ve read about them, and I’ve found myself wondering whether there might be a fresh way to understand them.”

“Architecture is a relatively young profession – the American Institute of Architects was not founded until 1857. Seeking to distinguish themselves from lowly builders and carpenters, architects adopted a specialized vocabulary, often substituting complicated Latin-based words for their simpler Anglo-Saxon equivalents, for example, fenestration for window, … trabeation for beam, planar for flat.”

“Amid the heated debate over whether the Smithsonian was right to remove ‘Fire’ from an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, a lot of the facts about the artwork have become clouded, obscured and even misconstrued by the public and various reports.”