Category: visual

“The brighter colors – the water is bluer and the boroughs are a pinch less dark – provide a more cheerful look. Shortening the typographic dimensions of the pop-up boxes of additional information makes navigation a little less daunting. Putting Manhattan on steroids relieves the linear congestion and allows the graphic elements to breathe.”

“The Genyornis – a heavy bird which had a broad, rounded beak and was about twice the size of an emu – became extinct about 40,000 years ago. If verified, the painting would pre-date rock art from parts of Europe which have been reliably dated to 30,000 years ago.”

“Change the museum’s operating hours and drop the general admission price, from $10 to zero. Fixing hours and admission could alleviate attendance woes. Both moves require study and planning, but they would begin the long-term process of rebuilding public confidence.”

“The glory years of youth and concept in British art are ending, not with a bang, but with a whimper. The death of the British boom in hot! new! young! art has been predicted before, but now it really seems to be happening. In its place a more catholic, and more honest era may be beginning.”

“Treated to the silken manners and melting gaze of the small, neat man from Trieste–with his unplaceable accent, which Tom Wolfe described as “soft, suave, and slightly humid, like a cross between Peter Lorre and the first secretary of a French embassy”–I felt like a farm boy with cow pies in my pockets.”

Edwin Land “touted his invention as a democratic amenity, like Edison’s bulbs or Ford’s Model-T: now the American Everyman could set himself up as an artist. The SX-70, Land’s most popular camera, was as convenient as a mobile phone, folding flat so it could be stuffed in a pocket.”

“The royalty, part of Labor’s arts policy at the 2007 election, comes into effect on June 9. After that date, artists and their estates will be entitled to a 5 per cent royalty when their works are resold for more than $1000 in Australia. But commercial galleries across the nation are anxiously preparing for the start of a scheme they only barely understand.”

“The mural — painted by renowned British street artist Banksy in the derelict Packard Plant in Detroit and later moved to a nonprofit gallery without the artist’s knowledge — has been taken off view after the gallery received threats that it might be defaced or destroyed.”

His latest buildings and city plans are redefining life and environmental conditions in the world’s fastest growing economies, where legions of steroidal architectural implants recall the novelist Norman Mailer’s warning in 1964 about Modernist architecture’s “empty landscapes of psychosis”.