Category: visual

“Next week MONA, the $80-million [Aus] private museum and ideological playground of Hobart-born David Walsh, will finally open to the public, two years overdue. … Walsh is a self-made millionaire … beholden to nobody, which leaves him free to present art and ideas that public institutions or private museum owners with more polite tastes would not dare touch.”

The mosaic, which is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum, dates from circa 300 CE and was excavated in Israel 15 years ago. Its cable-patterned borders surround lions and giraffes, elephants and rhinos, dolphins and doves and snakes and sea monsters.

“On Tuesday the city of Helsinki is announcing that it has commissioned the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation to undertake a feasibility study to examine the possibility of building a new Guggenheim Museum in Finland.”

“Restoration work on the seventh tier of the tower, just below the bell chamber at a height of about 164 feet, has returned a unique optical effect which was conceived at the tower’s construction. At this tier, a series of decorative arches allow sunlight to stream into the tower in intricate patterns, producing a kaleidoscope-like effect on the tower’s white marble.”

“The similarities between Broad and Simon — both self-made men of vast wealth, savvy business acumen, genuine art passion and an often-remarked penchant for aggressive and controlling dealings — are as vivid as the differences.”

“A giant cockerel in ultra-marine blue and a bronze boy on a rocking horse are the next two commissions for the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square.”

“Purists are sure to raise the ‘slippery slope’ argument: that once you start selling off youthful, crummy Edward Hoppers to pay for backup quarterbacks, soon you’ll be selling off first-rate Raphaels to fund Ben Roethlisberger’s legal expenses. That’s hooey.”

“A still image can seem fairly commonplace; that is how the world has been portrayed for millenniums. But it is also artificial; stillness is rarely discerned in daily life. Moving images, though the familiar substance of experience, have only been created in recent centuries.”

“Designed by Thomas Leeser, the swollen baby-blue form, which has been grafted onto the back of a 1920s building, effectively blurs the boundaries among architecture, film and viewer. In doing so it immerses you in the kind of fantasy world you usually get only when the lights are turned off.”

Many visitors to the Tate Modern’s Gauguin exhibition “left the building in a state of what one prominent art critic called ‘gallery rage’. The crowding in front of the paintings on display was so bad … that they have vowed never to go to such a big show again.” (New Yorkers, on the other hand, are used to this.)