Category: visual

There has been a rash of art vandalism in the past year. What motivates some people to want to deface or destroy a piece of art?

“Shuffling to join in all this real-estate ferment, the New York Times has lately moved out of its gloomy castle on West 43rd Street and into airy new headquarters designed by Renzo Piano with Fxfowle. Endowed with daylight, elbow room, a decent cafeteria, and window shades that respond to the sun, it’s almost enough to put a reporter in a good mood. How disappointing for the rest of us, though, that the Times has built itself a stolid lump of a building.”

“Water Lilies” is the second-most-popular cellphone wallpaper sold by Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, which opened a new digital-images shop in September. This service is only the latest future-shock innovation at the museum, a civilized institution that has nonetheless adopted what one tech reporter scarily described as a policy of ‘aggressive digital-capture.’ The M.F.A. now has one of the biggest image databases of any art museum in the world.”

“16 years after the Communist Party lost control, both Russian collectors and their art have come in from the cold: a new breed of super-rich collectors is spending record sums to buy back their domestic art heritage, much of it from the foreign owners who snapped it up for a song in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution.”

“The dates on each image match days when each official spoke about Iraq in ways the artists consider criminal — with sound clips of them speaking, along with a camera flash going off and a prison door closing. Some have criticized the library for displaying political satire in an institution that receives public funding.”

“As the two sides reminded each other in frank exchanges on Wednesday, they need each other — for art loans, joint scholarship and possible collaboration on archaeological digs. And their mutual mistrust has faded considerably.”

“The Miami Art Museum on Friday unveils a working design for its new $220 million bayfront home that, safe to say, looks unlike any building in Miami — or any other place.”

“The Asian Art week, which celebrated its 10th anniversary last month, suggests that London is bound to remain a world center of Chinese art collecting for quite some time. What ultimately matters in difficult fields such as Chinese ceramics or jades is knowledge, and London runs far ahead of the competition.”

“One year away from being completed, the Frank Gehry redesign is a staggering success. True, Gehry’s original design was worrisome for its heavy-handed treatment of both the front and back elevations.” But “now, it’s possible to be convinced of the great pleasures already being delivered by the project.”

“In unveiling a design today by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the museum plans to portray [the plans for a new museum building] as an interim stage in the development of its $220 million project overlooking Biscayne Bay.”