Category: visual

“The Austrian Culture Ministry revealed earlier in September that it has received a formal request for the restitution of The Art of Painting by 17th century Flemish master Johannes Vermeer, which has been displayed at the Kunsthistorisches Museum since 1946.”

“Following the tried and tested format, he takes 12 young British designers, sets them challenges and each week eliminates the weakest. The winner becomes part of Starck’s ‘tribe’ (his somewhat cultish description of his Parisian design company) for six months, their triumphant concept given the opportunity to join the world’s most iconic orange-squeezer.”

For instance: “The Parthenon was a Christian church, Roman and then Orthodox, longer than it was a pagan temple; and all this before it became a mosque, a gunpowder store and, in the 19th century, the chaste monument and tourist magnet we know, or think we know, so well today.”

“It started decades ago as a publicity stunt and quickly became an addiction for audiences and museums alike. African art, Armani, motorcycles, Matisse – who cared hat as long as there was a lot. … I can’t think of any good reason for the museum to be renting acres of Turners or Courbets ever again.”

Artist Rita Grosse-Ruyken turns precious metals into such delicate works as Rays of Light, a solid-gold bowl less than one millimeter thick that “undulates with every sound and movement of the air” and The Silver Cord, in which “she cast, forged and hand-pulled refined silver into a diaphanous thread that she then wove into a [21-meter-long] quasi-transparent spatial structure.”

“Devotees of late Monet can rejoice. The Museum of Modern Art is putting all three of his beloved waterlily paintings on view for the first time since 2001, along with a relatively recent acquisition and two guests.”

“Anyone of a squeamish disposition may want to avoid a certain room at the National Portrait Gallery, which today displayed its latest, £300,000, acquisition: 10 pints of the artist Marc Quinn’s frozen blood in a self-portrait cast of his head, sitting zen-like on a concealed refrigeration unit.”

“A Scottish man who has taken an interest in [Linda] Carty’s case played her seven-minute recording over and over for an hour while standing atop one of Trafalgar Square’s large statue bases, or plinths. He held up placards with messages from Carty and stood in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of her.”

“Experts had reason to doubt [its] authorship: Decades of varnish had discolored the canvas so much that its palette looked far darker than that of other paintings by Velazquez.” But the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent cleaning of “Portrait of a Man” revealed under “yellowed varnish and poor retouching … all the marks of Velazquez’s hand.”

Shop Architects’ revision of the Atlantic Yards arena is “somewhat more promising” than the first successor to Frank Gehry’s design. “Some of Mr. Gehry’s original ideas … have been restored,” and the structure has “an appealing rust-colored steel skin,” yet “it still falls short of the high architectural standards set by the design the city was originally promised.”