Category: visual

A story in The Art Newspaper disputes the widely reported news that important Iraqi archeological sites have been looted or damaged since the American invasion. “No one had bothered to challenge the reports, the evidence or the logic, not least because many ancient sites were in hostile terrain and couldn’t be double-checked.”

According to auctioneers, works by Edvard Munch have significantly increased in price as a direct result of the 2004 robbery of the artist’s The Scream and Madonna.

Sales of Cuban art skyrocket, while Wilfredo Lam, an internationally recognized master, receives his first major American show. Is Cuba going the way of Russia and China?

“This is the most narcissistic of Wright houses — and that’s saying something. Wright used the windows, eves and piers to frame other elements of the house in perfectly composed abstractions.”

“Unesco, the world cultural body, has threatened to humiliate France by placing the Lascaux caves – known as the “Sistine Chapel of prehistory” – on its list of endangered sites of universal importance.”

An unexpected sexual curse has been uncovered by archaeologists at Cyprus’ old city-state of Amathus, on the south coast near Limassol, a newspaper said Friday.

“Artists have been appropriating images from Madison Avenue for decades. But what happens when the tables are turned? In recent years a number of advertising campaigns have seemed to draw their inspiration directly from high-profile works of contemporary art. And the artists who believe their images and ideas have been appropriated are not happy about it.”

Nevermind all the remarkable clothes — L.A. is in the midst of a designer boutique boom that’s as much about statement-making architecture and one-upsmanship as it is about selling bags and boots.

“Critics have incessantly described these high-profile projects as bullish expressions of the nation’s budding global primacy. Yet these buildings are not simply blunt expressions of power. Like the great monuments of 16th-century Rome or 19th-century Paris, China’s new architecture exudes an aura that has as much to do with intellectual ferment as economic clout.”

“Designed in the days when Berlin was the third-most populous city in the world after New York and London and a humming industrial center, the housing projects were conceived to combine social needs with avant-garde architecture.”