Category: visual

The good news: “When an expanded Buffalo Albright-Knox-Gundlach Museum opens in 2021, visitors will see their own reflections in a kaleidoscopic network of mirrored glass suspended over the center of the campus.” The bad news: “But before experiencing Common Sky, a monumental sculpture by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson that will enclose a new public gathering space, … the gallery’s buildings will close for at least two years.” – The Buffalo News

“It is now axiomatic that a locale of stunning natural beauty will quickly degrade into a morass of crowding once it is posted on the platform as a pristine image. The herd instinct kicks in, and other users who also want to be photographed in those same lovely landscapes converge with their own cameras and Instagram accounts and followers—ad infinitum, ad nauseam.” – The New Republic

Brian T. Allen argues that LACMA’s new Zumthor makeover of its campus is just what the museum needs. “Donna Reed and Celeste Holm were attractive and workable. Lana Turner was fabulous. L.A. will always crave fabulous… I think a big, Met-style museum in Los Angeles is culturally counterintuitive, and I mean the civic culture. In L.A. style, it’s time to do something fresh.” National Review

Without Robert Hooke’s keen drawing eye, and the microscope, who knows what might have happened? You can read “the story of British art through a scientific looking glass. The Royal Society plays a bigger role than the Royal Academy.” – The Guardian (UK)

If you can doodle, you are drawing. And you’re not alone. “When I was a baby critic, a veteran colleague once told me to avoid drawing shows at all costs, since they were just preliminary exercises. But some of the greatest shows I have ever seen were composed entirely of graphic masterworks.” – The Observer (UK)

And it didn’t always go well. ‘”This is offensive to me,’ [a] vexed visitor complained. The security staffer found himself in the position of having to defend the activists’s right to protest, and soon after, he needed to separate the visitor and the protesters, as an expletive-laden physical scuffle broke out between the two sides.” – Hyperallergic

The music festival actually commissions several massive artworks to go with each year. At first, it was connected closely with Burning Man; now, 20 years in, things are slightly more international. “‘It’s a great canvas: It’s green, lush, and the sky,’ says Poetic Kinetics leader Patrick Shearn of creating his kinetic artworks for the wide-open Indio setting. ‘Anything that breaks the skyline is something they’re looking for — and spectacle.'” – Los Angeles Times

Architects weigh in. Here’s one opinion: “Surely, this is an opportunity to recreate a once-hidden – and now destroyed – timber structure with a modern, fireproof, lightweight replacement. The ideal outcome would be a respectful combination of the dominant old with the best of the new.” – The Guardian (UK)

The Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum was all set to open a show on the Rosetta Stone, with accompanying Egyptian and Mesopotamian artifacts, when they invited University of Iowa art historians to prepare a presentation on the items. A grad student noticed that all was not right: About 90 of the 125 objects are “either definite or very likely fakes. … They obviously got taken and defrauded.” The Hoover Museum canceled the show. – KCRG (Iowa)