“So much is made of the nation’s neglect of infrastructure, yet the U.S. actually is spending record sums on it. We don’t make progress because the nation fails to lay out new communities so they can be efficiently served by means other than the auto. A start would be to group people-intensive colleges and commercial centers as hubs along corridors served by transit and walkable streets.”
Category: visual
A Treasure Trove Of Ancient Egyptian Painting
Art from the tomb-chapel of Nebamun (ca. 1350 BC) has just gone on permanent display at the British Museum. “One explanation for their appeal, I think, is that, unlike a lot of Egyptian art, they were intended to be seen by the living, not the dead… [who would have admired} the confident draughtsmanship, the wonderful sense of colour, the intensity of the observation, the ability to convey human foibles and, not least, the sense of fun.”
Making Tropical Landscaping Into An Art
“Brazil teems with jungles, forests and all sorts of exotic plants, flowers and trees. But until the Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx came along to tame and shape his country’s exuberant flora, his countrymen had mostly disdained the natural riches that, often literally, flourished in their own backyards.”
Jean Nouvel Covers A Building In Blue Velvet
Okay, it’s not velvet – it’s a translucent fabric sheath stretched over the external frame of Nouvel’s new Copenhagen Concert Hall. During the day you can see silhouettes of the people inside; at night, it’s lit a bright cobalt blue with a montage of projected video images. Nicolai Ouroussoff calls the result “one of the most gorgeous buildings I have recently seen.”
Something Useful To Do With Those Publishers’ Clearing House Thingies
Texas artist Annette Lawrence has taken a year’s worth of junk mail, cut it into two-inch strips, stacked and bound it, and called it art. And she’s charging $10,000 for a month’s worth. (The Dallas Museum of Art has already bought December.)
Giant Piano From Big Goes To Philly
“The Please Touch Museum has gotten a big acquisition: the 16-foot light-up keyboard used in the 1988 Tom Hanks movie Big, upon which the Oscar-nominated Hanks and Robert Loggia danced/played ‘Chopsticks’ and ‘Heart and Soul.'”
Cerny’s EU Sculpture, Now With Toilet Discreetly Veiled
“A depiction of Bulgaria as a toilet in an artwork at the European Union headquarters in Brussels was covered up following a complaint by the government in Sofia. The section of the ‘Entropa’ avant-garde installation showing Bulgaria as a Roman or ‘Turkish’ toilet was draped with a black cloth last night, said Jan Vytopil, a spokesman for the Czech presidency of the EU.”
The Getty Grows Up
James N. Wood, president and CEO of the J. Paul Getty Trust, “agrees that calling the Getty an underachiever is a ‘fair characterization,’ but he wants to concentrate on the future. ‘We are an institution that is entering young adulthood,’ he says. ‘It’s been a hell of an adolescence: rich, painful and with fighting among siblings.'”
Survey: Contemporary Art Market Recovery 3-5+ Years Away
“Confidence levels in the contemporary-art market have fallen 81 percent since May 2008 and may take between three and five years to recover, according to a survey by research company ArtTactic Ltd. ArtTactic’s Western Art Market Confidence Indicator dropped to 10.5 from 56, the lowest level reached since the survey was first conducted in May 2005….”
American Owns Posters Taken By Nazis, Court Rules
“A German court today declared a retired U.S. airline pilot to be the rightful owner of his father’s poster collection, which was seized by the Gestapo in 1938 and is currently housed in a Berlin museum.” The decision contradicts an earlier judgment.