Category: visual

“Architecture lectures commonly involve laser pointers and slides. In his, architect Tuomas Toivonen prefers throbbing bass and electronic drums.”

For decades, the MFA had closed some of the entries to its building, shutting out the neighborhood. Opening them has also helped open up the neighborhood, which is bustling with new life.

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is voluntarily returning 19 artifacts to Egypt that had been in its collection for decades and that Met curators recently determined came from Tutankhamen’s tomb, the museum said on Tuesday.”

The man who created the First Bank of Antimatter and made porn for plants (featuring explicit pollination) “has now appointed himself God’s pornographer. Opening this week in a Brooklyn art gallery, Keats will be showing images … [from the] Large Hadron Collider (LHC), collisions that recreate conditions that occurred nearly 14 billion years ago, just after the moment of ‘divine coitus’.”

“The fourth plinth has outlasted any excitement it originally caused. It has become a chore. The current exhibition of hopefuls for the next commission in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields has something Mannerist about it.”

“There’s a fresh fizz to the contemporary-art market these days that’s been largely driven by sales of Pop classics by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, and others. Pop’s cheery colors and reassuringly familiar objects such as crumbly pies and red lobsters appeal to jet-setting bidders who want to buy art again but aren’t ready to stretch for edgy unknowns.”

“It was widely reported that on Monday night, at Phillips de Pury auction house, Andy Warhol’s 1962 portrait of Elizabeth Taylor and her lovers, Men in Her Life, sold for $63 million. Problem is, it’s not quite true. Because of a type of (legal) insider deals, the winning bidder may have written a check for less, even a chunk less, than $63 million to take the picture home.”

That would be the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Miss., a set of five pavilions set amidst a cluster of live oaks. (Gehry says he wanted the buildings to “dance with the trees.”) The collection is built around the ceramic art of George Ohr (1857-1918), who called himself “the Mad Potter of Biloxi.”

“Charles and Rosalyn Lowenhaupt have donated their entire collection of 1,357 Japanese prints, hanging scrolls, six-panel folding screens, and other related works of art,” most dating from the Meiji era (1868-1912).

Museum director Thomas Campbell “said that the need to replace the museum’s two fountains, which have been turned off for several years, led to a broader discussion of the plaza’s layout. … Apart from the steps, he said, the rest of the space, including the fountains, would be completely rethought.”