Category: visual

“The author of books including the Consolations of Philosophy and The Architecture of Happiness, has commissioned five houses by some of Europe’s leading modern architects, which he plans to rent out on a not-for-profit basis. He said his purpose was ‘to help people get over the dichotomy that modernism equals awful and antiquated equals great’.”

“What is over is the narrow view of photography – the idea that the camera is a recording device, not a creative tool, and that its product is strictly representational – not manipulated, not fabricated, not abstract …”

“The superrich have always sent very public mixed signals about their need for privacy. In this case the headline-making price and the anonymous buyer made that paradox and its manipulative aspects especially clear. But how private does someone who buys a painting at public auction for a world-record price want to be?”

“The newly-discovered 12 by 16 inch oil painting was long thought to have been a copy made in the style of the Renaissance master long after his death and dismissed as almost worthless. But art historians now believe it to be a first draft by Raphael of part of a larger painting.”

“There is the impossible task of drawing up a shortlist in the first place. Unless the judges are full-time professionals, doing the back-to-back biennale circuit, there isn’t much hope that they will all have had the opportunity to see the shortlisted works. And since these are very rarely the ones displayed at Tate Britain, the public has even less chance of seeing what it was the judges so admired.”

“Architects and urban planners who traveled to Medellín seemed to return telling some version of the same enthusiastic story about the renaissance taking place in Colombia’s second-largest city, which has been driven in large part by investment in ambitious civic architecture.”

“One of the last great surprises of 20th-century art has come and gone, photographed in the sale room on its journey from one private collection to another. If it appears in exhibitions in the future that will be the result of curators fawning to some billionaire for a peep at what, in reality, should be the cultural property of us all.”

“There are fruitful overlaps with contemporary classical composition, experimental rock music and improvisation. Sound artists use everything from sine wave generators to lectures, wildlife recordings, public space, bell ringing, electromagnetic fields – even the odd folk song.”

“Parisian museum-goers are checking out Greco-Roman influence on 1st century to 6th century Buddhist art from Gandhara, a kingdom that spanned part of today’s Pakistan and Afghanistan. … In Gandharan art, Buddha and bodhisattvas often wear Roman-style drapery and sandals, and their facial features and curly hair recall classical Greek and Roman statuary.”

“‘Santa Monica we haven’t ruled out, by the way,’ Broad said after outlining how a Grand Avenue museum” – very near Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Museum of Contemporary Art – “would help fulfill his longstanding vision of building up downtown L.A. as a magnet for economic growth and cultural tourism.”