Category: visual

Says Sgt. Kristopher J. Battles, the program’s full-time staffer, “We’re not here to do poster art or recruiting posters. What we are sent to do is to go to the experience, see what is really there and document it – as artists.”

“She has made robins draped across prayer books under tiny chandeliers, lovebirds gazing at their reflections in miniature mirrors above tiny splayed-out mouse rugs, as well as wilting pheasant chicks suspended from resin-coated balloons.”

“After it came to light last week that films and videotapes made by the artist Larry Rivers included footage of his two daughters naked, New York University informed his foundation that it did not want those materials included as part of the archive it was purchasing.”

The US Bureau of Land Management has just finished an Environmental Impact Statement for the artists’ project Under the River, in which a stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado will be covered by (what else?) fabric panels. And Christo is delighted: “The identity of our project is built in the permitting process. We were banging our heads and asking to have an environmental impact statement for such a long time.”

“The last time the Victoria and Albert Museum tried to build an extension, the design [by Daniel Libeskind] was likened to an exploding cardboard box and sparked an eight-year battle for approval and funding which ended in a resounding no. … [Yet] the V&A will hold a design competition this autumn for a major extension on the very site where the bitterly controversial £70m Spiral was intended to go.”

The da Vinci canvas is back back on display at Great Britain’s National Gallery “after an 18-month conservation project revealed details lost for a lifetime under a coat of darkening varnish.”

“As David Hockney has put it: ‘He invented a black world that had not existed before, certainly not in Florence or Rome. Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.’ And that resemblance may be no accident.” It seems that Caravaggio may have used a form of camera obscura to project images onto his canvases, where he traced them.

“Hundreds of works are packed away in a hot, dusty storeroom, tended to by a doting but frustrated staff. Many of the paintings there are damaged. All are withering from dangerous conditions and haphazard storage, from the heat and Iraq’s official indifference to an important if lesser-known part of its artistic heritage.”

In addition to his new offer on “a 99-year lease on public land in downtown Los Angeles where he can build an art museum,” the billionaire “already has promised to pay the full construction cost of up to $100 million and provide a $200-million endowment that would yield an estimated $12 million a year to cover the museum’s operating expenses.”

In gentle black-and-white photos shot by professional photographers, “the nonprofit Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep captures the bittersweet farewell of parents and their lost babies.”