Category: visual

“No other country rivals the British tradition of free entry to museums. … At all the other great galleries of Europe you need to buy a ticket. This is a sitting duck, isn’t it? If I were deciding how to save money on museums, I would want to look at the idea of charging for admission. But it would be a terrible mistake.”

“The makeover purges the Americana from her clothes. She no longer looks as though she’s wearing a flag. She has shrugged off parochialism to become an international sophisticate.”

150 years ago, “a Japanese delegation sailed to America to present the recently signed U.S.-Japan Treaty of Amity and Commerce to President Buchanan. They arrived in San Francisco on March 29, 1860, for a three-month tour that ended with two weeks in New York. That visit is the focus of ‘Samurai in New York,’ a new show at the Museum of the City of New York.”

“‘There’s a snobbery at work in architecture,’ says Foster, speaking at his riverside studio in Battersea, London. ‘The subject is too often treated as a fine art, delicately wrapped in mumbo-jumbo. In reality, it’s an all-embracing discipline taking in science, art, maths, engineering, climate, nature, politics, economics.'”

“Today Sir Michael Peat, the prince’s private secretary, claimed Charles opposed Lord Rogers’ £3bn modernist designs because ‘it is part of the Prince of Wales’ role and duty to make sure the views of ordinary people that might not otherwise be heard receive some exposure’.”

“The painting, called the Taking of Christ, or the Kiss of Judas, and considered the most valuable piece of art in Ukraine, was stolen from a museum in the Black Sea port of Odessa in 2008 in what officials described as a ‘cultural catastrophe’.”

“Despite a slow economy and MoMA’s relatively high ticket price of $20, a number of exhibitions generated heavy traffic,” while “[m]embership also rose, to an estimated 134,000 in the 2010 fiscal year. Despite the upswing, the museum cautioned that the contributing factors are ‘not necessarily reproducible.'”

The Spanish government is ignoring a non-binding vote in its parliament that would suspend construction of a high-speed rail tunnel 13 feet from Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia “as a cautionary measure while independent experts devise an alternate train route that would link Barcelona with the French border without jeopardising the work of ‘God’s architect.'”

Britain’s seaside towns are increasingly shedding their kiss-me-quick, slot-machine image, with visitors now as likely to encounter a piece of contemporary art by the likes of Sir Peter Blake or Gavin Turk as they are a Donald McGill postcard.