Category: visual

Architecture isn’t the reason that Dallas’ new performing arts center “feels stuck in something of a time warp.” At fault is the arts district’s “organizing principle — the idea that grouping together institutions for the arts, and recruiting an all-star team of leading architects to design them, remains a viable means of coaxing underdeveloped urban neighborhoods to life.”

“From paintings of colorful cultural scenes in Jamaica Plain to a mural of open books along the Neponset River Greenway, public art in Greater Boston has transformed walls that were once targets for taggers and graffiti artists.”

“[T]he Monterey County Sheriff’s Office said Tuesday that the Sept. 25 heist appears to be … a scam by one or both of the alleged victims, an aspiring lawyer who once sold puppies and a retired Harvard Medical School professor.” The sheriff’s office said that the alleged victims “had not provided documentation that the paintings existed.”

“For any architect taking on the challenge of the new [Barnes Foundation] space, the tangle of ethical and design questions might seem overwhelming. … The answers found in the drawings of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the New York architects who took the commission, are not reassuring.”

“Working with curators at the White House and at the local museums that made loans, the First Couple selected some works whose politics are explicit, and mild. They seem to redress past imbalances in the nation’s sense of its own art.”

“Both the Gardner and the Barnes are domestic in scale and appealing relics: the antithesis of today’s giant museums with endless white galleries. … We need museums that don’t toe the art-world party line, but idiosyncrasy can go too far.”

“A survey of more than 60 major art museums in the US shows that the directors of more than one third have recently taken pay cuts, many of them substantial, and senior staff at most of those institutions have also had their compensation trimmed. … But directors of large institutions are still among the highest paid in the culture sector….”

“If you believe, as Maurizio Seracini does, that Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest painting is hidden inside a wall in Florence’s city hall, then there are two essential techniques for finding it. As usual, Leonardo anticipated both of them.”

“No interiors were included” among the plans unveiled yesterday for the Barnes Foundation’s new home, where officials have long said they will “replicate the floor plan of the Merion galleries, as well as the precise arrangement of paintings and objects in those galleries. … Even so, opponents of the move reacted negatively to the plans.”

“Arts commentators may feel disoriented. Without the shock factor to discuss, what can you say about this year’s event?”