Category: visual

“Some consumers have come to see the credit card as an emblem of something other than an albatross of monies owed. A few months ago, a company called CreditCovers started selling “skins,” with special designs that consumers can stick over the fronts of their cards, theoretically transforming them from mere financial tools to emblems of identity and potential conversation starters.”

British Museum director Neil MacGregor believes that “the museum was, from the start, an enlightenment institution. It was a practical affirmation of Addison’s vision of Londoners as citizens of the world. It set out to show that other peoples were like us. It was an embodiment of Lockeian toleration. And that’s how it ought to be today. For that reason, says MacGregor, there is no unique or coherent narrative within the museum.”

To save the art in China’s Dunhuang caves from mobs of tourists, conservators are scanning the caves ad creating digital images. “Officials will scan 45,000 square meters (54,000 square yards) of frescoes, or about the area of 10 football fields, and 3,390 Buddhist statues. The images will form a virtual-reality tour for visitors to see before they enter the grottoes. The project, a collaboration with the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh, may take five years to record the first 20 of 492 caves.”

“The world’s cleverest designers, said Dr. (Paul) Polak, a former psychiatrist who now runs an organization helping poor farmers become entrepreneurs, cater to the globe’s richest 10 percent…. ‘We need a revolution to reverse that silly ratio,’ he said. To that end, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, which is housed in Andrew Carnegie’s 64-room mansion on Fifth Avenue and offers a $250 red chrome piggy bank in its gift shop, is honoring inventors dedicated to ‘the other 90 percent,’ particularly the billions of people living on less than $2 a day.”

“American playgrounds often seem anything but playful. Their equipment is designed not so much to let children have fun as to make sure they don’t hurt themselves. Sure, a simple sandbox and climbing gym are enough to mesmerize toddlers. But what’s to lure older children? … Hope may be on the horizon. We seem to be witnessing, if not a tipping point, then a seesaw tilt in playground design.”

“The biggest prize in the arts, the £100,000 Gulbenkian museum prize, was awarded Friday to Pallant House in Chichester, described as ‘a jewel of a gallery’. It was a surprise victory for a comparatively small independent regional gallery, which beat one of the biggest museum projects of recent years, the £27.9m complete restoration and redisplay of the giant Kelvingrove art gallery and museum in Glasgow.”

Dr. Timothy Potts will leave his post as director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth on Sept. 1 after nine years leading the institution.

The Denver Art Museum’s new Libeskind-designed home is pulling record crowds. Still, the crowds aren’t as big as hoped, and the museum recently laid off some staff. “We finished our capital project having it paid off 100 percent. We now have a projected balanced budget for this year. To have built a building as ambitious as ours, to have initiated a program as ambitious as ours and be in the financial position we’re in, I think we are in a very positive and healthy position.”

“After years of financial troubles and unfulfilled potential, the $158.2-million makeover hopes to recapture the imagination of metro Detroit. The DIA is on the brink of its most sweeping reinvention since moving into its Beaux Arts building on Woodward Avenue in 1927.”

“Needless to say, the American Institute of Architects is deeply concerned that the next Architect of the Capitol may not be a degreed member of their profession. The title has come and gone over the centuries, but at times, especially during major expansions to the building, the job has been done by some of the most storied names in the evolution of the District’s federal look.”