Category: visual

“Lehman Brothers has won permission to release, and sell, $8m (£5.4m) worth of art that once adorned office walls at the bankrupt investment bank.”

“Here’s a great photo that Getty photographer Paul Kane snapped at Perth’s North Cottesloe Beach earlier this week. The performance features musicians from the West Australian Symphony Orchestra playing their own instruments in the surf. It’s apparently the latest in a series of ‘surreal human sculptures’ by artist Andrew Baines.”

Seattle artist and political/social activist Deborah Lawrence was one of several hundred artists invited to create ornaments for this year’s White House holiday tree. Her submission was the only one rejected. The reason: her ornament (to the surprise of nobody who knew her well) was covered with tiny text calling for George Bush’s impeachment. (Laura Bush’s spokeswoman said, “I think it really is a shame and, quite frankly, not very much in the holiday spirit.”)

A few of the hard-working folks who get naked and sit still for art students discuss the requirements, pains and pleasures of the job.

“The British Army is offering to help create a museum in Basra, which would be set up by the Iraqi authorities in one of Saddam Hussein’s palaces,” set by an artificial lake in the Iraqi port city.

No, it’s not a children’s nonsense poem. It’s a description of an image by Carl Warner, “a London-based photographer who makes foodscapes: landscapes made of food.”

A hardy group of artists is keeping up the laborious old technique of animation using pencil drawings, creating whimsical films aimed at adults. A full-length feature could require 25,000 drawings or more (at a rate of 24 drawings per second).

Peter Aspden looks at the striking new Acropolis Museum, to open next spring just across the Parthenon in Athens, and sees potential for resolving the intractable dispute between the Greek Ministry of Culture and the British Museum over the Elgin Marbles, which were carted off from Athens to London in the 19th century.

“Greece welcomed back on Tuesday a marble fragment from a frieze decorating the Parthenon temple which an Austrian soldier removed during World War Two… An inscription on the fragment, measuring 7-by-30 cm (2.8 by 12 inches), says it was taken from the Acropolis in Athens on February 16, 1943 – in the midst of the three-year occupation of Greece by the Axis powers, led by Germany.”

Architect Dominique Perrault’s new European Court of Justice building in Luxembourg features a pair of “pencil-thin gold towers” that “light up like a pair of giant candles” in the late afternoon sun, a light-filled central plaza, and a central judges’ chamber surrounded by a gold-colored “woven steel veil, which floats over the court like an improbably glamorous mosquito net over the bed of a fairytale princess.”