Category: visual

Can towering skyscrapers and natural beauty ever really coexist? A new generation of architects doesn’t see why not, and the corporations that populate high-rises across America are beginning to see the benefits of a different kind of urban planning. “Not so long ago, green construction was largely dismissed as prohibitively expensive and as just so much political correctness. But the arrival of the Condé Nast tower in Times Square in 1999, designed by Fox & Fowle and billed as the first green skyscraper in New York, sent the message that corporate America saw something to gain from the green model.”

A new documentary focusing on the revolutionary changes that hit the American art scene beginning in the 1960s has an intriguing premise: that artists of the era consciously abandoned any attempt to cater to existing public interests and began creating art that viewers would simply have to “catch up” to. But in the years since Warhol, Stella, Hockney, and others burst onto the scene, much of the museum-going public has managed to embrace the revolutionary style they embodied.

Th Metropolitan Museum has offered to return the 2,500-year-old Euphronios krater to Italy. “The museum pledged to return the vase and 19 other disputed antiquities after weeks of negotiations with Italy, which will now consider the offer. Under the proposal, the vase, 15 pieces of Sicilian silver and four other ancient vessels would be returned to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other prized antiquities, and the Met would assert that the objects were all acquired in good faith.”

“The mystery surrounding the theft of seven French Expressionist paintings from a wealthy American collector almost 30 years ago has been solved by a London court case. The canvases, worth at least £20m, are thought to have shuttled back and forth for decades between Massachusetts, Monaco, a Swiss bank vault and the British offices of Sotheby’s.”

“By any conventional measure, Yale’s exhibition about Machu Picchu would seem a windfall for Peru. As one of the most ambitious shows about the Inca ever presented in the United States, drawing over a million visitors while traveling to half a dozen cities and back again, it has riveted eyes on Peru’s leading tourist attraction. Yet instead of cementing an international partnership, the exhibition… has brought a low ebb in the university’s relations with Peru. At issue are a large group of artifacts that form the core of the show, excavated at Machu Picchu in a historic dig by a Yale explorer in 1912. The government of Peru wants all of those objects back.”

England’s Crafts Council “is in crisis, victim of a miasma of resignations, rows and inertia that swirls round one of the worst policy mistakes made by the arts establishment since Labour took power in 1997. Where did it all go wrong?”

A huge planned expansion of New York City’s Javits Convention Center isn’t urban architecture at its most inspired. Partly it reflects the failure of large government projects. “Although Richard Rogers’s design is more promising than, say, the defunct Jets stadium proposal ever was, it reflects a narrow view of how cities grow. For the time being, bold urban planning remains a chimera here.”

At the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, “an unfortunate visitor tripped over his shoelace and fell on to three Qing dynasty vases, shattering them. The vases had been placed – rather optimistically, perhaps – on a windowsill on a staircase.”

Someone is flooding the Russian art market with fakes. “Fueled by the country’s burgeoning wealth and the desire for prestigious assets with patriotic cachet, Russia’s upper class has driven the market for Russian art to unprecedented heights. The frenzy has also attracted some very skilled and knowledgeable crooks.”

A decision about where a new museum in DC celebrating African-American history is to be made this week. “The country has always been reluctant to come to grips with the slave part of its history. Washington, more than any other city, has that contradiction. People look at the South with the cotton plantations and sugar plantations and say, yes, slavery. But the idea of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison as slaveholders is a much more difficult idea. You don’t sit in Lafayette Square and think about the slave auction block.”