Category: visual

“Prepare for chaos. The latest work of art to adorn Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth will be a giant soapbox, which will give anyone who fancies it the chance to do whatever they want for an hour at a time.”

“Extra staff have been dispatched to guard the great cultural gems of Greece as the government in Athens tries to deflect growing criticism of its handling of national treasures.”

“Aspire, a landmark for the university, will be three times taller than The Angel of the North and more than eight metres higher than Nelson’s Column. At 33 metres, the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, would have paled against it.”

“Two internationally renowned architects, including Pritzker Architecture Prize winner Zaha Hadid, will design temporary pavilions in Millennium Park to serve as focal points for next year’s regionwide celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Burnham Plan, the visionary document that changed the face of Chicago.”

“Call it the Dawn of the Dead Artist. The message from the market is as clear as it is macabre. In a quest for fresh material, blue-chip contemporary-art dealers are finding a healthy source of revenue buried six feet under.”

“With a growing number of prominent architects designing buildings in places like China, Iran, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, where development has exploded as civic freedoms or exploitation of migrant labor have come under greater scrutiny, the issue has inched back into the spotlight. Debate abounds on architecture blogs, and human rights groups are pressing architects to be mindful of a government’s politics and labor conditions in accepting commissions.”

“They say giving away art to be auctioned off at charitable events costs artists money, and often they don’t even get a tax receipt.”

“Smithsonian Business Ventures was created in 1999 to coordinate the for-profit divisions of the Institution, such as Smithsonian magazine and other publications, the gift shops and Imax theaters. But the unit had an often-contentious relationship with the museum staffs, and its leadership was criticized for the amount of money spent on salaries and expenses.”

“It is the artists, and a certain line of thinking about art, that have given the people with the cash permission to buy and sell what amounts to nothing, and to do so for ever larger and more insane sums of money. All this sensational commerce is fueled by the anti-aesthetics that were born nearly a century ago among the Dadaists, and have by now morphed into the laissez-faire aesthetics that give collectors sanction to regard one of Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel balloon animals as simultaneously a camp joke and a modern equivalent of a Tang dynasty horse.”

After many years and many false starts, Harvard is finally launching a major expansion of its art museums. In the process, what have been three separate institutions — the Fogg Art Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum — will be consolidated under one roof, and one name: the Harvard Art Museum.