Category: visual

“Painting living creatures, and especially humans, is extremely controversial in Islam and banned completely by some sects.” But at a Shiite mosque in Baghdad, “worshipers gaze up at something that was illegal under Saddam Hussein’s rule and even now could put the mosque at risk: paintings” depicting the 7th-century battle that led to the Shiite-Sunni split.

“Imponderabilia [in which two nude performers stand flanking a narrow doorway] is not as still as the other pieces. When people walk through, you’re constantly readjusting, a little bit here, a little bit there. The intent or the energy or the aggressiveness of the audience becomes very visible.”

“Marina leaned her head back at a slight angle, and to one side. She fixed her eyes on me without — so it seemed — any longer seeing me. It was as if she had entered another state. I was outside her gaze. Her face took on the translucence of fine porcelain. She was luminous without being incandescent.”

Ada Louise Huxtable: “Seeing the original ink-and-wash drawings made almost 500 years ago, with Palladio’s handwritten notes, often done on the site, erases the centuries; they create a miraculous fusion of the distant past and immediate present, a kind of aesthetic time warp that brings the man and his moment wonderfully alive.”

“This is not the first time that [Charles] Saatchi has tried to repeat his trick.” But unlike the Young British Artists the collector propelled to fame with “Sensation” 13 years ago, the artists he now embraces are not “a brandable group of the sort that can easily be pushed — ready packaged — on to the public.”

Peter Plagens: “China does not have a system–if it can be called that–like Western Europe and America do of writers not in the direct pay of artists and galleries passing more or less independent judgments upon the contemporary stuff.”

“The project, Blue Star Museums, is a joint effort of the endowment and Blue Star Families, a nonprofit that addresses the challenges of military families. So far more than 600 museums have signed on, including about 30 children’s museums.”

“This is certainly the biggest theft from a French museum in a very long time. It’s incomprehensible to me because these works are absolutely unsalable. There isn’t an art dealer on the market who would buy them.”

“In the latest theft, judicial police said two men managed to get past two security gates at the collector’s Marseille home and then knocked at the door, AP news agency reported. According to Reuter, the most important work taken was a lithograph of a woman’s face painted by Picasso.”

“The giant wax seal in the neck of the bottle ‑ large enough for the craft workers to crawl through to work on the model ‑ reveals the artist: YSMBE, Yinka Shonibare MBE. Although it looks like a giant playful joke on millions of seaside souvenirs, the ship is a surprisingly faithful tribute to the admiral whose monument overshadows it.”