Category: visual

“While the lousy economy has forced cities to lower their sights, it has provided clarity about what really matters. The smart places are investing their limited disposable income in low-cost, high-impact projects that improve the quality of life for people who actually live in them.”

“The Gardner Museum is notorious for having, among its dozens of superb treasures, many pictures bought by Isabella Gardner in the belief that they were autograph paintings by recognized masters, but which turned out to be copies or fakes.”

“These young architects can’t be expected to take on all the economic forces that surround them. Their overwhelming desire is to do stuff and to do it in a way that anyone, whether in Littlehampton, Alabama, Hastings or Peckham, can enjoy. It’s not a bad way to start.”

“For anyone familiar with the work of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, New York-based architects of the three-story, 114,000-square-foot museum, what comes across most strongly in the design is a sense of a restless creative imagination muted, held back and otherwise reined in.”

“The Romantic, 19th century Beaux Arts ideal of sky-lighted art galleries has unfortunately guided the design program of a building intended for 20th and 21st century art.”

“Is an institutional version of borderline personality disorder at hand? Are these moves part of a worldwide trend? Or is this just a mutual grab for shrinking market share?”

“For the 2010 Olympics, Vancouver made a conscious decision to eschew big-deal architecture in favour of sustainability, both economic and environmental. The extent to which economic sustainability was achieved is definitely an unanswered question, but there is also another one: Did the world leave with a positive impression of our architects and their designs?”

Noam Braslavsky: “I [would] build a ritual of visiting him, like you go visit your old grandfather before he died. But it’s a lot like you go visit the body of the leader of communist countries – like the mummy of Lenin. … [If] you listen to what people say about [Sharon], it’s the same emotion they have toward the appearance of the Israeli state.”

“Jim Hedges, a hedge-fund specialist and art aficionado, recently wrote to Martin Sullivan, director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, DC, requesting that his loaned work Untitled, Self-Portrait by Jack Pierson be removed from the Hide/Seek NPG exhibition ‘until such time as the David Wojnarowicz video is reinstated in its full unedited version’.”

“A masterpiece by Pieter Bruegel the Younger will remain on public display in the Yorkshire mansion where it has hung for centuries after it was saved through an appeal that raised £2.7m in three months.”