Category: visual

“Finding a fairytale Japanese teahouse sprouting from wooden stilts in a corridor of the Victoria and Albert Museum is an unexpected yet curiously apposite experience. Unexpected, because this bewitching structure is one of seven brand-new, imaginative and full-scale buildings installed through the museum’s galleries this week …”

“Bath has been a city of constructional splurges. The Romans splurged there, and the whole place must have been in a state of splurge when [it became a fashionable resort] in the 18th century … It must be hard to know how best to develop or modernise part of so elegantly homogeneous a city as Bath. You might employ one of your iconists, a Pei, a Foster or a Gehry, … [or] you could consult a Prince Charles.”

Already threatened with demonstrations, the exhibition about homoeroticism will mainly “feature classical works from the National Museum’s collection, juxtaposed with contemporary art. The director, Piotr Piotrowski, said its emphasis will lie on eastern Central European art because ‘here the battle for equal rights for homosexuals continues’.”

“The main figure might be Apollo, or it might be Hymen, the Greek god of marriage. The man draped in blue might be a poet who is being presented to his spouse, the rather pale lady – or he might not be. What is the die with the five dots, underneath the woman draped in red, all about? What is the significance of all the gold?”

“A cave complex boasting prized prehistoric paintings will reopen after eight years of closure, despite scientists’ warnings that heat and moisture from human visitors damage the site … [V]isits to the Caves of Altamira in the northern Cantabria region will resume next year, although on a still-unspecified, restricted basis.”

“The reconstruction of Berlin’s royal palace, a 552 million-euro ($660 million) project that aims to restore the former residence of Prussian rulers to the center of the German capital, will be delayed by three years” due to budget cuts announced by chancellor Angela Merkel’s government. The landmark “was razed by the East German government in 1950 under international protest to make way for a Red Square-style marching ground.”

Television critic Ginia Bellafante on Bravo’s new series, Work of Art: The Next Great Artist: “[An] act of restitution for prior misdeeds of reality television. … This is cable television as a National Endowment for the Arts grant. The comparison makes Work of Art sound vaguely tedious, which it is decidedly not.”

Art critic Christopher Knight on Work of Art: The Next Great Artist: “Can a television series jump the shark in the first episode? Bravo’s new, awkwardly titled reality-contest show … doesn’t merely argue in the affirmative. The plot also gives new meaning to avant-garde, spinning off its axis before getting to the 10-minute mark.”

“I’ve climbed up to its testicles, but not much further,” the artist says. “It’s like a bridge or a piece of civil engineering. … The smallest bit of it is the bit that’s closest to the ground, that is the complete reverse of the way that stable structures are made.”

“We like to think that there is something distinct about the British sense of humour, that the comic is a singularly important element in the make-up of the British national character. I find it hard to imagine an equivalent show in the Pompidou Centre in Paris or in a German national museum.”