Category: visual

“Women constitute 15 per cent of the British property and construction workforce. They occupy just 30 per cent of seats on boards of housing and regeneration quangos. Only 31 per cent of university-educated architects are women.”

“Three fingerprints have led experts to conclude that a tattered picture considered inferior by its owners is a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. It could be worth almost $290 million.”

“The Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres put the seriousness of architecture to the test. They are notable for two things: offering ways of helping cancer sufferers beyond medical treatment, and doing so in places designed by leading contemporary architects. They assume that there is some connection between whatever aesthetic magic an architect can weave, and making victims of a dread disease feel better.”

David Koch “disclosed in an interview on Thursday that he has pledged “at least $10 million” for the effort. He said the renovation project will include an overhaul of the two fountains, a dramatic upgrade to the museum’s exterior lighting, and a full refurbishment of the entire plaza.”

When Madeleine Grynsztejn became director at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008, the then-40-year-old institution was in the throes of what she called “a healthy midlife crisis” Gauging her success, of course, will take time. But one critical marker is incontestable: attendance at the museum is at record levels.

“Seattle Art Museum’s contemporary/modern curator Michael Darling is the big boy with the unkillable career, ascending ever more heavenly realms – from LA Weekly art critic to LA MOCA curator to SAM in 2006 to Chicago July 12, where he’ll be chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art.”

“Denmark’s best-known national emblem, the four-foot-tall bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid, [has been moved] from the rocky, quayside location it has occupied since 1913 to a site in Shanghai … [where it] will be the centerpiece of the Danish pavilion in Shanghai’s 2010 World Expo.”

Broad hasn’t confirmed that a site near Disney Hall is where he wants to put his art museum, but let’s assume it is. “They could sensibly begin by asking how the museum’s construction might be leveraged to help produce truly meaningful improvements to the blocks surrounding it — and to help draw foot traffic and avoid the hidden-in-plain-sight quality of Arata Isozaki’s design for the MOCA building.”

“Beginning in 1973, with the help of a few collaborators, [a conceptual artist named William] Furlong created Audio Arts, a no-budget ‘magazine’ composed solely of cassette recordings of interviews with artists Mr. Furlong found interesting. He mailed them to friends and subscribers, at first hundreds and then thousands.”