Category: visual

The iconic Sydney Opera House is seeking an estimated A$600 million (£300 million) “for what it says are much-needed renovations. The backstage equipment is in a state of dilapidation, and the orchestra pit is so small and acoustically compromised that players have to work in rotas to safeguard their hearing. The stage is so narrow that stage hands have to wait in the wings to catch the ballet dancers as they hurtle off stage.” (With video tour.)

Ikea’s catalogue typeface switch, from the venerable Futura to Microsoft’s omnipresent Verdana, has design people fuming. The “new look has been defined not by a company proudly parading its 66-year heritage, but by something driven by the clarity of the digital age. Nothing wrong with that – it’s a business. … But what would happen to our appreciation of the world if all our decisions were governed by commerce alone?”

“I think it’s difficult for people outside Pakistan to understand what this kind of recognition on an international stage means within the country,” says the director of the Asia Society Museum. And “even amid the country’s poverty and recent turmoil … work is being made that deals head on with difficult issues like religion, political oppression and the status of Muslim women.”

“It’s easy to feel affection for Mount Rushmore’s strange grandeur, but only if you forget where it is and how it got there. … The Crazy Horse Memorial has some of the same problems: it is most definitely an unnatural landmark. Some of the Indians I met in South Dakota voiced their own misgivings, starting with the fact that it presumes to depict a proud man who was never captured in a photograph or drawn from life.”

“The aim is to create a new London landmark close to the proposed Olympic stadium as a monument to a more natural way of marking time. The proposed site is at East India Dock, six miles along the river from Westminster Palace. Its designers hope their clock will become as iconic as Big Ben, which has been marking time for 150 years. The site is currently a bedraggled nature reserve.”

“The Allentown Art Museum has received one of its largest gifts ever – about 500 works and the Long Island home and studio and New York City apartment of the modernist artist Peter Grippe.”

“Bristol City Council will put to the public vote whether murals which appear on buildings, walls and fences are street art or graffiti. As part of a formal street art policy, the council’s street clean team will not take action if people decide the graffiti is nice and want to keep it. … Although the council has pledged to remove offensive and unsightly graffiti, a street art policy will ‘seek to define and support the display of Public Art’.”

“After 50 years of using a typeface called Futura, the Swedish home furnishing chain Ikea decided to switch to a new font called Verdana. The typeface-sensitive Ikea fans around the world are not amused.”

As Bauhaus turns 90, Germany’s main Bauhaus institutes are marking the occasion with a joint exhibition. “With nearly 1,000 objects–including models, studies, paintings, photographs and furniture–spread over the ground-floor galleries of this stately neoclassical building, the exhibit is the largest Bauhaus retrospective ever mounted and the first time that the three Bauhaus institutes, once separated by the Iron Curtain, have collaborated.”

“In Britain as in America, the recession has forced many retail businesses to close or move to cheaper premises, leaving behind vast spaces that have generally remained empty. … Now independent curators and entrepreneurial artists … are stepping into the breach, persuading landlords and municipal councils to turn vacant spaces over to them temporarily. Galleries have sprung up throughout the country, and particularly in London….”