“China is to send a team of artefact hunters to … scour museums, libraries and private collections in Britain, the US, France, Japan and elsewhere to photograph and catalogue what was taken from the Yuan Ming Yuan, popularly known as the Old Summer Palace, after British and French armies sacked it in 1860.”
Category: visual
Bailed-Out Banks Own Some Great Art. Let’s See It.
“Last week, the Royal Bank of Scotland agreed to display its corporate art collection to the public, following pressure by Parliament and the art world. … We wondered: Shouldn’t bailed-out U.S. banks do the same? And what, exactly, would they show?”
Norman Foster Designs An Art Gallery
“[A]rchitects often say the possibilities of a building lie in its limitations, and Mr. Foster was drawn to the challenge of designing what is essentially a vertical art gallery on New York City’s former skid row, a landscape dominated by restaurant supply stores.”
Gail Harrity Named Philadelphia Museum President
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s chief operating officer since 1997, “Harrity served as interim chief executive for more than a year, since the death of Anne d’Harnoncourt, while the museum’s board of trustees searched for a new director.”
AP Says Fairey Is Lying In Confessing Hope ‘Mistake’
“In an amendment to its countersuit filed today in a New York court, the AP claimed that ‘it is simply not credible that [Shepard] Fairey somehow forgot in January 2009 which source image he used to create’ the work in question.”
Sculptor Turns Old Opera Costumes Into Art At Lincoln Center
E.V. Day, “an artist best known for transforming clothing into sculpture material” – or, as she says, “futurist abstract paintings in three dimensions” – has been let loose in the closets of New York City Opera. The results are now suspended from the ceiling in the grand promenade of the Koch Theater.
Why Should An Artist Copy Used Books When There Are So Many Real Ones Lying Around?
“[T]he painter and sculptor Steve Wolfe has taken his bibliophilia to unrivaled extremes. With extraordinary skill and ingenuity, he creates copies of used books [and vinyl records] that are so true to their subjects that it’s hard to believe that they’re not the real thing.”
Shepard Fairey’s Lie Reveals A Truth About Him
“The cover-up demonstrates his shameless disregard for artistic endeavors that aren’t his own. If he had any respect for the photographer or the scores of other artists whose work he has ‘referenced,’ he would give them credit.”
Richard Rogers Displays His Humanist Side
The West London cancer center for which Richard Rogers won his second Stirling Prize Saturday night “shows Rogers’s critics, such as the Prince of Wales, that his architecture, at its best, can do human-scaled and even vaguely traditional, that it’s about more than just machines and modernism.”
In Athens, Acropolis Museum Awaits Marbles’ Return
“For decades, the main argument against the return of the sculptures — known as the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles — was Greece’s lack of a suitable location for their display. The new Acropolis Museum is a stunning rebuttal.” To highlight what’s missing, the museum intersperses “plaster casts of the sculptures housed in London … with original pieces.”