Category: visual

Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima “has won acclaim for recent projects including the new Bowery home for the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, the Glass Pavilion at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, and this summer’s Serpentine Gallery pavilion in London.”

The three-month loan of the 2,500-year-old cylinder, reported by Iranian TV but unconfirmed by the museum, follows last month’s threat by Iran to “sever all ties with the British Museum unless a promise to send the Cylinder to the National Museum of Iran was honored.”

“The image – which looked like a strange mix of African art and Keith Haring – was a page from Carl Jung’s long-discussed but only recently published Red Book, a richly illustrated diary that captured Jung’s ‘confrontation with the unconscious’.” Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman looks at the picture and free-associates.

In a “thought experiment,” documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time) offers a photo of barren, cracked earth with a desiccated cow skull and poses the above question – along with his own answer and the replies of several dozen readers.

“If RNC Chairman Michael Steele doesn’t have one of these in his den, I’ll eat Rush Limbaugh’s shorts. The staggering truth: Chia Obama is a real product, and its creator … means it to be a sincere tribute to Obama, who he says has inherited ‘the biggest can of worms ever put on a president.'”

“Its white, wafer-thin balconies bulge outward, each slightly different from the other. They race around corners and shoot upward in fantastic, voluptuous stacks. This is a new vision of verticality, and it makes Aqua one of Chicago’s boldest — and best — skyscrapers in years.”

“After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential.”

Nicolai Ouroussoff: “A big surprise is how much of the school’s mission still feels relevant, from the effort to come to terms with mind-bending technological advances to the desire to serve an audience beyond the usual cultural elites.”

“Its net loss was $57.8 million, or 89 cents a share, up from $47 million, or 73 cents a share, a year earlier.”

Judith Dolkart, currently associate curator of European art at the Brooklyn Museum, joins the Foundation as it prepares to break ground on its new home in center city Philadelphia. She will, among her other duties, plan and oversee the special temporary exhibitions the Barnes will add to its program at the new building.