Category: visual

Why is it empty? “The plan sheds new light on why the plinth has never had a full-time occupant and has been used recently to showcase the work of modern artists. It also explains why the Mayor of London, who has been informed of the plan, recently performed a mysterious U-turn on proposals for a permanent statue to be placed on the monument, blaming ‘complex planning issue’.”

Australian art critic and historian Christopher Allen resigned from the panel of judges after Adam Cullen’s triptych Corpus Christi made the short list for the $20,000 Blake Prize for Religious Art.

“In the crudest narrative of contemporary Chinese urbanism, foreign architects are carpetbaggers — some more talented than others — while the institutes are sclerotic bureaucracies, practically allergic to innovation. But there is a third group of architects that may, in the end, have the definitive say about the shape of the new Chinese city. It is made up of young designers who were born in China and educated in the U.S. or Europe and have returned to start their own firms, burdened by neither stereotypical Western ideas about Chinese culture nor ties to the hidebound institutes.”

On July 22 a graffiti artist and onetime protégé of Haring’s seriously altered it by filling in the negative space with an intricate black interlocking pattern and spray-painting it with the repeated tag LA II. “When I was painting that mural, I didn’t feel like it was me, I felt like it was Keith’s spirit in me,” said the artist.

“Chief Executive William Ruprecht said profit would have increased were it not for the new auction schedule. He said wealthy people with more than $100 million — who are insulated from economic woes — remain their best customers.”

David Rockwell usually builds playgrounds for adults – high-end restaurants, theatre sets and expensive stores. But, he wondered, is there a way to rethink the traditional children’s playground? His first project “will forswear slides and jungle gyms and instead employ an open multilevel space with large sand and water features, dams, cables, pulleys and an array of ‘loose parts’ — toys and tools that kids can use to alter the environment.”

The chiaroscuro work, alternately known as The Taking of Christ and The Kiss of Judas, was stolen some time between Tuesday night and early Thursday morning from a museum in Odessa.

Can the type of economic analysis that explains the $4-plus gas at the pump can also explain the greatest artists of the last 100 or so years? Economist David Galenson’s “statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate.”

Beijing is full of glitzy new buildings built for the Olympics. Some of the world’s most prestigious architects were recruited for the job. But “China’s preparations provoked an intense and unusually open debate here about the relationship between architecture and nationalism.In recent weeks, the Chinese press, in the sort of quasi-Orwellian turn it has nearly perfected, has begun to give primary design credit for the Bird’s Nest to the local architects who aided Herzog & De Meuron in executing it. Some news reports have excised the Swiss firm completely.”

Aside from fending off accusations of crypto-fascism, Italy’s current Prime Minister must now defend himself against claims that he ordered the censoring of an all-too-anatomically-correct painting of 18th-century Venetian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo hanging in his office.