Category: visual

An electronic brush promises to give artists more control of their digital work. “Unlike other painting programs that allow artists to pick up colors from a limited computer palette, I/O Brush lets people paint with colors and textures that might come from, for instance, a piece of fruit, a favorite shirt, a memento from a trip, a teddy bear or garden flowers. The brush contains a microphone, a miniature video camera, and sensors and is wired to a computer that runs a touch screen. An artist picks up “ink” from her environment by lightly brushing over the desired object.”

“Almost all political leaders find themselves using architects for political purposes. It is a relationship that appeals to egotists of every description. That is why there are photographs of Hitler and Mussolini, Tony Blair and François Mitterrand and the first President Bush – as well as countless mayors and archbishops, chief executives and billionaire robber barons – each bowed over their own, equally elaborate architectural models looking just as narcissistically transfixed as the beatific Saddam beaming over his mosque.”

Two years ago a trove of paintings said to be by Jackson Pollock was discovered. “In the two weeks since the news of the works’ existence – delivered with the help of a Web site and a flurry of press releases – an intense and at times personal battle over who really painted them has been shaping up within a small, once unified group of the world’s leading Pollock experts.”

Las week the Corcoran Gallery In Washington announced it wouldn’t go ahead with a planned expansion by Frank Gehry. Benjamin Forgey is disappointed. “Gehry’s Corcoran joins the short, unhappy list of highly significant modern buildings designed for Washington but not built: Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s competition-winning 1939 design for a Smithsonian Gallery of Art on the Mall; and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Crystal Heights, the stunning mixed-use project he designed in 1940 for the spot where the Hilton Washington stands today. Both of these potential modernist masterpieces were staunchly opposed by the city’s architectural establishment. By contrast, Gehry’s building won widespread approval. Not that it helped.”

So many museums seem to be building new buildings or expanding. But smaller museums are having a tougher time. ”While there is a sense that things are getting better, small museums are certainly seeing no evidence of that. Fund-raising is not increasing. The numbers of school districts able to afford tours is diminishing. The economy does not seem to be turning around for us.”

The British Museum wants to return drawings looted by the Nazis. But a British court has ruled that an act of the British parliament prohibits such returns. So might parliament change the law? Not likely…

A new report says artifacts in the Smithsonian Museum are endangered because of facilities that are in bad disrepair. For example: “A leak at the National Air and Space Museum caused rust on the wing of the first plane to hit Mach 2. Plaster walls are weeping in the Renwick Gallery. Some buildings and exhibits on the Mall and at the National Zoo have closed because of disrepair, and more leaks threaten the Smithsonian’s historic collections and irreplaceable objects, the report says. Cost to fix and maintain the deteriorating facilities over the next nine years? At least $2.3 billion, the Smithsonian estimates — almost 13 times its current facilities budget.”

Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reported that “millions of dollars in purchases by Washington art collectors have gone untaxed, and that an effort to collect that revenue was impeded by upper management and then suspended late last year.” This week a flurry of state investigations has been announced, and state tax collectors says they’ll start actively trying to collect the taxes owed.

For the first time in 200 years, the Royal Academy of Art has expelled a member. “Professor Brendan Neiland resigned as Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools last July amid allegations regarding missing funds from academy accounts. The professor is the first artist to be stripped of his membership since James Barry was ejected in 1799. “

“When the Berlin wall came down, the Greek Cypriots relabelled Nicosia the ‘last divided city in Europe’. The Green Line, marking the point at which Turkish troops stopped their advance after the 1974 invasion, cuts the capital neatly in half as it zigzags from west to east across the island… Although Cyprus joined the European Union in 2004 and Green Line checkpoints have been open for the past two years, the lack of a formal peace settlement means that the ‘dead zone’ is still a heavily charged feature of the island’s landscape. Leaps of Faith, an international art exhibition in public spaces on and around the Green Line, is an ambitious attempt to challenge political clichés about the division of Cyprus and at the same time reinforce the newfound relationships between the Greek and Turkish communities.”