Category: visual

“Slowly but surely, Cambodia’s visual arts scene has been emerging from the shadow of the Pol Pot era, nurtured by a clutch of mostly Western-owned galleries dotted around the capital. Years of faith and investment are finally paying off.”

“Singapore’s Marina Bay Sands will open the world’s first ArtScience museum in February, the latest attraction at its $5.5 billion gambling complex built by U.S. casino giant Las Vegas Sands.” The 50,000 square feet of galleries “will deliver exhibits from art and science, media and technology, to design and architecture.”

“A decommissioned power station in Delhi, the Indian capital, is to be converted into an art gallery modelled on London’s Tate Modern.”

“Three men were convicted Wednesday in Malmo, Sweden, in the theft earlier this year of three paintings, including one by Edvard Munch. The Malmo Art Museum hadn’t known the paintings were missing until police recovered them in October while investigating another crime.”

“I’m not so sure that a museum that struggles to cover its expenses annually and a college that’s doing very well and growing very nicely but is basically a separate organization today can survive in that form. Now, I’m not so sure that they can’t, but the idea here is to have these people come in and take us through the exercise of trying to figure that out.”

“After being forced to go in just two directions, up and down, for more than a century, escalators are finally getting a little freedom. A newly invented moving staircase will be able to twist, bend, spiral and even snake around sharp corners.”

“A particular type of ancient rock art in Western Australia maintains its vivid colours because it is alive, researchers have found. While some rock art fades in hundreds of years, the ‘Bradshaw art’ remains colourful after at least 40,000 years. [Analysis] has shown that the paintings have been colonised by colourful bacteria and fungi.”

“In so many museums, curators are telling the story of the objects on display–why this is in the collection, why that is an important piece–while we’re trying to use the objects in our collections to tell a story about how people go about their lives here and elsewhere around the world, and often about the intersection of the natural and cultural worlds,”

“An architecture museum done right would help cultivate a public that, in the past decade, has been shocked into caring about building.”

Reducing the museum experience to more apps providing more data is just as laughable as reducing the experience of going to church down to parishioners tweeting: “At church, pastor just mentioned loaves and fishes, anyone have some sushi recs for later?”