Category: visual

“Wide-angle lenses are great for taking dramatic photographs with a big scenic sweep, but they’ve got a big weakness too – they distort objects towards the edge of the frame. Now software can make wide-angled digital photos with perfect perspective, thanks to a secret of 18th-century painters.”

“‘Those drawings? Oh, yes, those are mine,’ said the diminutive octogenarian, who admitted to scaling buildings and climbing fences in order to put up life-sized stenciled images that satirize modern society’s mores and its inherent political power structures.”

“Critics don’t normally weigh in at this stage of a design or dwell on the many tricky decisions involved in maintaining the design’s integrity in the face of financial pressures. But in this case those pressures are unusually intense, and the way they are resolved will determine the answer to [this] question … : Will the final result be an experience as good as — or better than — Marcel Breuer’s Whitney?”

The filthy-rich artist has submitted plans to create a gallery space from an old munitions factory in London’s Hyde Park. His plan is to install “the cream” of his personal collection, “including works by artists including Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Giacometti and Jeff Koons” (plus the diamond-encrusted skull, naturally).

Why should Hirst and Banksy have all the fun? A concern called iArtist London “provides (relatively) easy-to-use looking kits for creating your own versions of famous works by contemporary British artists like Damien Hirst, Tracy Emin, Rachel Whiteread, Marc Quinn, and Banksy.”

“There is a maturity, a common sense about critics and consumers of popular music that is totally absent from the high arts. No one thinks it demeans Lady Gaga to admire Madonna. There is a sense of history in the appreciation of pop that completely eludes today’s debates about art.”

“Marc Glimcher, president of the Pace Gallery, which represents the [Rothko] estate … said he saw the Four Seasons’ idea as bad art karma. ‘I think you’re getting way too close to the edge of something weird, where an almost-completed-but-fake painting is hung in the place where the artist decided he was not going to let the real painting hang.'”

This weekend, artists from an Indiana gallery “plan to re-create Grant Wood’s American Gothic painting using day-old bread. … [They will] create a mosaic by attaching nearly 4,000 pieces of crusty bread to a plywood grid. They are calling the event a ‘toast’ to their customers.”

“Witnesses in the Chelsea Barracks case ‘concocted an untrue story’ to cover up the involvement of the Prince of Wales and the Emir of Qatar in the cancellation of an £81 million modernist housing project, the High Court was told yesterday.”

The unexpected death Friday of Getty Trust president and chief executive James Wood “leaves the top two positions at the institution vacant,” thereby creating what some see as “a unique opportunity to resolve a longstanding issue.” The institution’s “unusual organizational structure … has been a source of internal conflict over the years.”