Category: visual

Berlin’s newly-christened $143-million American embassy, “designed by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, is something of an anti-monument — a five-story, low-slung, sandstone-colored palimpsest on which is inscribed the complicated history of urbanism in Berlin, the troubled state of U.S. embassy design and the pitfalls of slavishly contextual architecture.”

“Across the Arab world, new museums, funds and foundations have inadvertently exposed a glaring rift between artists of an older generation who paint and sculpt and artists of a younger generation who research and collect. Walid Raad’s current exhibition in Beirut appears to be a serious attempt to make the work of a younger generation visible to an older generation that refuses to see it, and vice versa.”

“The Painter and the Model was taken in a daylight robbery in June from the state-owned Estacao Pinacoteca museum. Police said an arrested suspect had led them to the engraving, wrapped in a plastic bag and hidden in an attic, apparently in perfect condition.”

“Tate Modern, London’s riverside art museum, revised plans for the new wing that architects Herzog & de Meuron are building for it, and said the 2012 opening may be delayed because of tough fundraising conditions.”

“Chunks of frescoes depicting life in the Roman city are missing, carried away by visitors or eroded by the elements. Graffiti is gouged into walls. Tourists ignore signs forbidding flash photography as they take pictures of erotic designs inside the Lupanare, an ancient brothel. The ancient city southeast of Naples has deteriorated so much that Italy declared a state of emergency this month.”

“The hourlong show has been described by the Elves team of Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz as a Project Runway-style competition series that takes on the art world. Aspiring artists compete to produce various styles of artwork (painting, sculpting, etc.), which is then judged by a panel of experts.”

“These new guidelines suggest no works exported from their country of origin before 1970–the date set by the Unesco convention on the illicit trade of the same year–should enter North American collections.”

“The Louvre’s bold new Islamic art wing had its first stone laid by Sarkozy yesterday , launching the museum’s most daring project since IM Pei created the giant glass pyramid 20 years ago. The world’s most visited museum will have Europe’s biggest purpose-built exhibition space for an Islamic art collection, which France hopes will reconcile the secular republic with the world of Islamic heritage.”

Cydney Payton, who led a passionate charge to construct Denver’s first stand-alone museum devoted to contemporary art, has announced her resignation from MCA Denver in late October, the building’s first anniversary.

Le Corbusier’s own idea of the perfect space seems curiously telling. Having spent a lifetime at the cutting edge of progress, expanding his reputation and designs to maximum scale, he found his ideal home in his cabanon – a spartan, one-roomed wooden hut on the Côte d’Azur, where he spent every summer from 1952 onwards.