Category: visual

“In occupied Paris, a Gestapo officer who had barged his way into Picasso’s apartment pointed at a photo of the mural, Guernica, asking: ‘Did you do that?’ ‘No,’ Picasso replied, ‘you did’, his wit fizzing with the anger that animates the piece.”

“The global economic crisis wears on, but the Museum of American Finance is already documenting its history in an exhibit that opened on Wednesday. ‘Tracking the Credit Crisis’ provides a timeline of the events that led to the current recession and translates the catchphrases of the economic downturn such as ‘securitization,’ ‘liquidity,’ and ‘derivative’ for the average person.”

In England, there is “fresh debate about whether to preserve what used to be regarded simply as bad Corbu-derived architecture. Occasionally a cultural figure provides a little window into a nation’s shifting identity, and in Britain the self-regarding Swiss-born, Paris-based architectural genius who died in 1965, at 77, may now be one such figure.”

“The Ivy League university sued Tuesday in federal court in Connecticut to assert its ownership rights over The Night Café. It also seeks to block a descendant of the original owner from claiming it.” That potential claimant says he is the great-grandson of Russian aristocrat Ivan Morozov, from whom the Bolsheviks confiscated the painting.

Christopher Knight: “When ‘Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective’ opened last November at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA) in the old mill town of North Adams, the reviews were rapturous. Having just returned from there, it’s easy to see why. This may be the most perfect union of contemporary art and architecture in the United States. It’s our Sistine.”

“A sculpture made using scaled down models of electricity pylons has won the 2009 Jerwood Sculpture Prize. The £25,000 commission will see winning artist Michael Visocchi produce a large-scale work at the Jerwood Sculpture Park in Warwickshire. … Visocchi said the work aimed to provoke thought about climate change, carbon footprints and renewable energy.”

The Kunsthalle in Vienna’s Museum Quarter is showing “one of the most talked-about art exhibits in recent memory: ‘The Porn Identity,’ an over-the-top exploration of sexual imagination. In the city where Sigmund Freud explored the dark recesses of consciousness that no one ever talked about, the exhibit aims to shatter the taboo about smut, which is somehow everywhere and nowhere.”

“Asked by a trade paper about ‘unrealized commissions’ he most wishes had been built, famed 80-year-old architect Frank Gehry brought up Atlantic Yards. ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen,’ he told the Architect’s Newspaper… Gehry’s Los Angeles-based design firm laid off all two dozen employees working on the Atlantic Yards project in November.”

“Five of Scotland’s top architecture practices have accepted a challenge to design a building out of Lego… [T]he project was designed to show ‘how even the humble plastic brick can be turned into a work of architecture in the right hands’.”