Category: visual

“All across Europe populist parties are growing, capitalizing, to an extent unknown across the Atlantic, on a very old-fashioned brand of propaganda art.” One such poster, of a Swiss flag covered with minarets, is credited with helping swing the referendum that banned the building of minarets in Switzerland.

He refuses to work with any inanimate object or substance; his artworks are always performed by “interpreters” – but in a gallery space just as if the piece were a sculpture. He insists that his works be completely ephemeral, not preserved or documented in any way. Yet he also insists on selling his works as if they were canvases or statues (though he forbids the use of written contracts).

The Cooper-Hewitt’s latest show “offers an array of objects and oddities, from household appliances to models for the sets of the musical Hairspray, punctuated by screens showing Web sites in action … But the bulk of the exhibition takes place in the palm of your hand, on a specially programmed iPod Touch … [which] turns the museum into your own private rabbit hole.”

The University of Notre Dame School of Architecture’s 2010 Richard H. Driehaus Prize for Classical Architecture goes to Spanish architect Rafael Manzano Martos, while Yale architectural historian Vincent Scully wins its Henry Hope Reed Award, for “non-architects who make significant contributions to traditional architecture.”

The long-vacant Tower Records store in the East Village will bustle this weekend “with performances, panel discussions and conceptual art installations, some lamenting the demise of music stores.” The event’s organizers “say it’s partly meant as a look at what the art world can learn from the music world’s troubles.”

Despite what critics have inferred, “the real influences on the Burj Khalifa begin with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s radical unbuilt plans for glass-sheathed towers, designed in 1921 while Mies lived and worked in his native Germany.”

“The nearly 500-year-old paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder are on separate wooden panels and depict Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, moments before the Fall.”

“Artists and developers link arms to throw art shows in unsold, high-design 2BR/2BAs along U Street and up 14th. These pop-up galleries-in-a-condo are such a phenomenon that a new crop of impresarios has emerged to connect the creatives with the capitalists.”

“The Metropolitan Museum of Art quietly pulled images of the Prophet Mohammed from its Islamic collection and may not include them in a renovated exhibition area slated to open in 2011.” A spokesperson says that the three images, which date from before visual representations of the Prophet were forbidden, are “under review.”

“Artangel, famous for its largescale and innovative projects, … has decided that it’s the turn of lesbian asylum seekers to take their place in the spotlight.” In its new project, “the women use vivid and dramatic stories and images that tell of the difficulties they faced coming to Britain,” a country where they may not be allowed to stay if they can’t prove they’re lesbians.