Category: visual

The most common theory is that the 500-year-old artwork is sitting in storage in Switzerland — specifically in Geneva, where, according to The New York Times, more than a million works of art are kept in secretive tax-free warehouses by collectors and galleries. But last week, another theory emerged in an opinion piece by art dealer Kenny Schachter published on Artnet: that the last known privately-held Leonardo is on a luxury yacht owned by Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. – CNN

The Cuban government, which regularly arrests artists and journalists, also expected to welcome a record-breaking 5.1 million tourists this year. Cuba’s leaders are well aware that cultural capital is one of their nation’s major assets. Rage, pain, and dissent were not only openly on view in this Bienal but were featured and promoted with hashtags like #CubaEsCultura. – New York Review of Books

There’s an idea in vogue that if an artist or writer can just talk to enough different people about their experiences in the city, they can give us a clear vision of San Francisco as it is now, as it was, and perhaps even as it will be. We may approach something like the Platonic ideal of the city’s so-called “soul.” – The Baffler

A whole host of Stirling Prize-winning architecture practices have declared an emergency in response to accelerating climate change. Calling for a “paradigm shift”, they unveiled 11 pledges to bring architectural practice in line with planetary limits and called on other UK designers to sign up. – dezeen

“The museumification process of a living cultural landscape and the consequences of the loss of ancestral knowledge in managing water, agriculture, sustainable production and occupation of the land, as a consequence of profit-guided, short-term decisions, as well as the absence of a holistic vision, is far more harmful than the airport alone, which is only a logic outcome of this misunderstanding.” – dezeen

Last year, a museum dedicated to the work of Étienne Terrus revealed most of its paintings were probably not by him. How did they get there? – The Guardian

“Blockbusters are not their thing. But don’t let the hush of the Beacon galleries mislead you; a profound transformation is afoot.” – The New York Times

“The grand columns that you see all around the complex are about creating space. You fill in that space, then you have something that was designed to be open becoming cluttered and oppressive. What makes the Barbican special would be lost.” – CityLab

To be clear, having more space does generally lead to people saying they’re more pleased with their home. The problem is that the satisfaction often doesn’t last if even bigger homes pop up nearby. “If I bought a house to feel like I’m ‘the king of my neighborhood,’ but a new king arises, it makes me feel very bad about my house.” – The Atlantic

This new vision for an art school was explicitly intended to combine knowledge of modern techniques for making things with a medieval attitude toward how and why you are making them. Gropius and his allies were going to save the modern world by shoving it as hard as they could both backward and forward at the same time. – The Easel