Category: visual

“Bill Moggridge, a founder of the design firm IDEO who is widely credited with designing the look of the first commercial laptop, … will be the first design practitioner to run the Cooper-Hewitt, bringing decades of experience as a businessman and industrial designer but none as a museum administrator.”

“An Italian medical expert says he has found evidence of a range of afflictions in some of the world’s greatest works of art. Vito Franco, Professor of Pathological Anatomy at the University of Palermo, claims that there are clear signs of diseases, from bone malformations to kidney stones, that cast certain icons of perfection in a very different light.”

“A draft report the museum complex released Tuesday shows visits to the Smithsonian’s 18 museums, galleries and the National Zoo increased about 19.4 percent in 2009, up from about 25.15 million visits in 2008.”

“Around 30 paintings, including works by Picasso and Rousseau, valued at around a million euros (1.4 million dollars), have been stolen from a private villa in the south of France … The reported burglary in La Cadiere d’Azur comes after a pastel by Degas disappeared from the Cantini museum in Marseille on New Year’s Eve.”

“A bronze sculpture of a nude hockey player taking a slap shot, that fuses the modern with the ancient, will greet visitors to the gay meeting place at the upcoming Winter Olympics in Vancouver.”

“The approach, known as ‘sparse coding’, builds a virtual library of an artist’s works and breaks them down into the simplest possible visual elements. Verifiable works by that artist can be rebuilt using varying proportions of those simple elements, while imitators’ works cannot.”

“Climate experts predict that at current rates of global warming, the city will face a tidal rise of 2 feet or more by 2080. … So MoMA has commissioned four teams of young architects to anticipate the waters’ rise and come up with new ways to break up the devastating storm surges.”

Ada Louise Huxtable: Saarinen’s “dramatic departures from the conventions of modernism caused considerable unease among his peers; they acknowledged his talents but were uncomfortable with his buildings, while critics tempered their misgivings with carefully qualified praise. (Full disclosure: I was among them.)”

“Art experts say it’s the equivalent of stumbling upon a surprise Shakespeare play or a lost Homeric epic. At this point, we have only a tantalizing mystery — perhaps the unspooling of a new Da Vinci code — dangling on the slender thread of secrets and a handful of clues….”

“The exposed nipples on portraits of women in the Ho-Down Mural Project violated a county sign code that bans (among other things) the showing of the areola of female breasts, the county says. Museum curator Laura Henkel covered the nipples with pasties, but argues that the murals are urban art, not signs.”