Category: visual

“With more than 3,000 people from as far away as Korea and Brazil joining a Facebook group calling for charges to be thrown out, Mr. Carnevale’s monster stunt touches on the growing legitimacy and celebrity of guerrilla artists. In many ways, sympathy for Carnevale stems from a cultural resistance to authority and the celebration of harmless fun in the face of overly serious prosecutors.”

“The Art Institute of Chicago has laid off 22 employees, or 3 percent of its staff, as part of a larger series of cost-cutting measures. in a statement issued Friday, the Art Institute said its other cost-cutting measures include a voluntary 10 percent pay cut for the director, a weeklong unpaid furlough for employees and a salary freeze.’

“Buoyed by the intense interest in its Jeff Koons contemporary art show last year, France’s Chateau de Versailles has unveiled this week the first piece of this year’s exhibit: A dynamic sculpture depicting a team of bright purple cube-like horses pulling a carriage.”

A slideshow of the new museum, which opened this week.

“Facing a $3-million bond debt that is due in September, the Long Beach Museumu of Art is fighting to maintain its collection amid calls for a city takeover and the sale of some of its most valuable works of art.”

“An anonymous family has donated $50 million to let the New Hampshire school create a visual arts center. The college did not identify the donor other than to say it was a family with a long history of ‘service’ to Dartmouth.”

“A pavilion designed by internationally renowned architect Zaha Hadid won’t open as planned Friday, and its completion is thought to be weeks away. The postponement [is] attributed to the manufacturer’s difficulty in executing Hadid’s complex, computer-assisted design.”

The 85,000-square-meter Dongdaemun Design Plaza & Park, expected to open in 2010 on the site of a former municipal stadium in north central Seoul, will “include a multi-purpose park, a design museum, a library, and other educational facilities. The impressive 30,000 square meter park will both give homage to and re-interpret traditional Korean gardening design with reflecting pools, lotus ponds, pebble beds and bamboo grooves.”

Cairo Expo City will include twin office towers (31 and 33 stories) and major conference and exhibition spaces under roofs designed to resemble wind-sculpted sand dunes. The Stone Towers office/hotel complex will have façades with “a vocabulary of alternating protrusions, recesses and voids” as well as a sunken landscaped plaza called the Delta.

Fear not, traditionalists: Amsterdam architect Ben van Berkel’s temporary pavilion in Millennium Park “is at once thoughtful and delightful, packing just enough bling to stand up to the park’s star attractions — the spitting, oversize faces of the Crown Fountain and the mesmerizing sky and skyline reflections of ‘Cloud Gate.’ Like those two populist works of public art, it is thoroughly interactive.”