Category: visual

“Until the 1970s, modern architects deluded themselves – as did a lot of planners and politicians – by recommending that cheek-by-jowl, apparently chaotic communities should be cleansed by busting apart historic city blocks and putting up high-rises. These days, no architect in her right mind believes society can be instantly enlightened by computer-generated lines.”

“What Miami needs is an institution that can host traveling exhibitions of all kinds, from antiquities to Asian art, and loan shows of Old Masters and modern and contemporary art from around the world. The publicly funded MAM should create a place to see the likes of King Tut, China’s Terracotta Warriors, and less commercial shows of masterpieces from the Metropolitan, the Louvre, and the world’s other great museums.”

“Senior Smithsonian officials are meeting with concerned museum staff over fears that removing a video from the National Portrait Gallery sets an unwelcome precedent. The action has generated protests, thousands of e-mails and an advisory board member’s resignation.”

Ada Louise Huxtable: “He was, in a sense, the anti-LeCorbusier, or the anti-Mies, looking for ways to recapture some of the things swept away by the modernists’ messianic zeal – connections to history, place and the environment. What we build, he believed, ‘should not be disassociated from the cultural past’.”

“A Paris engineer is suing New York’s Metropolitan Museum over a Paul Cézanne painting he says was stolen from his great-grandfather in Russia. Pierre Konowaloff says the art collection owned by his great-grandfather, Ivan Morozov, was seized on Lenin’s orders in 1918 during the Russian Revolution.”

“More than 20 years after the collapse of communism here, Hungary’s government is holding a vast rummage sale, auctioning off socialist-era paintings, sculptures and photographs that have been gathering dust in storage.”

“At the annual event more than 1,400 venues – including restaurants, shopping malls, hotels and government buildings – compete to snatch the crown for having the nation’s best throne. The prize: recognition from colleagues and a trophy bearing a mounted golden toilet seat.”

“Mummies decaying in Siberia, pyramids vanishing under the sand in Sudan, Maya temples collapsing: Climate change risks destroying countless treasures from our shared past, archaeologists warn.”

“In a conversation with the Spanish culture minister, … the US ambassador in Madrid … sought to tie the treasure found off the Iberian peninsula by Odyssey together with attempts by an American citizen, Claude Cassirer, to recover a painting by Camille Pisarro that hangs in a Madrid museum.”