Category: visual

“The prize comes as a ringing endorsement from his peers despite Rogers being bumped off the £1 billion Chelsea Barracks redevelopment project by the intervention of Prince Charles. His victory — for the Maggie’s Centre in Hammersmith, west London — came as a surprise.”

The Tate’s “publications arm, Tate Publishing, faces having to dump up to 12,000 catalogues that have been printed for the Pop Life exhibition at Tate Modern, which contain the offending image of a 10-year-old Shields.” For now, some are on sale “with a sticker placed ‘on legal advice’ over the nude image of Shields.”

“[A]s markets developed and a culture of criticism arose, people needed a shorthand way to refer to Renaissance pieces. The more frequently a particular work was discussed, the more likely that critics and historians would reach an informal agreement over what to call the piece.”

“Closed for 70 years following heavy bomb damage during World War II, Berlin’s ‘Neues Museum’ throws open its doors again on Friday, with 3,400-year-old Egyptian beauty Queen Nefertiti star of the show.”

The ancient stucco-and-limestone statue of Queen Nefertiti, the crown jewel of the newly reopened Neues Museum in Berlin, “has been in Germany since 1913. But it is only now that Egypt is demanding that this fragile and haunting object, perched alone in a domed room that overlooks the length of the museum, be returned.”

“In 2005 Mr. Hockney – temporarily, he says – left Hollywood, where he had lived full time since 1978, to transform the manicured green and golden slopes, woods and farmland of the East Yorkshire landscape into spare, quickly worked compositions charged with pink, orange and violet.”

A London exhibition features two attention-getting waxwork sculptures by Paul Fryer. The Privilege of Dominion, featuring a life-sized gorilla on a crucifix, is meant (says the artist) to depict the plight of the endangered primate. Meanwhile, Fryer has displaced Jesus himself – now black – to the electric chair.

“The appreciation of contemporary conceptual art … depends not on immediately recognizable skill, but on how the work is situated in today’s intellectual zeitgeist. That’s why looking through the history of conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons.”

“Designers know how to make buildings that dazzle us visually. Yet they’re often so intent on satisfying their client’s complex organizational needs, they forget about their obligations to city life. The Barnes design, by New York’s Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, gets an ‘A’ in aesthetics and an ‘F’ in urbanism.”