Category: visual

“It lay hidden for 2,000 years in Afghanistan, eluded the Taliban and escaped dozens of adventurers and bounty hunters. Now the Bactrian hoard, one of the world’s greatest archaeological collections, has been found. President Hamid Karzai discovered the 20,000 gold coins and artefacts, worth tens of millions of pounds, in a sealed vault under the main palace in the capital, Kabul, after ordering it to be opened earlier this year.”

A well-known British graffiti artist snuck one of his own works into the Tate Britain museum this week, and glued it to the wall, along with a typical title card describing the work. “The picture consisted of a rural scene with an image of police tape stencilled on to it,” and the card explained that the artist “argues that ruining the work in this way reflects how our nation has been vandalised by an obsession with crime and paedophilia.” No one at the Tate noticed the unscheduled addition to its collection until the painting came unglued and crashed to the floor several hours later.

One of the world’s finest collections of sculpture is located in Dallas, Texas. This is a fine thing for Dallasites, but such remote outposts of great art have a way of rankling the artistic glitterati in New York, London, and other ‘glamour cities,’ and for years, various museums and collectors have schemed and plotted various courses of action by which they might acquire the Nasher Collection. “But to the relief of home fans, Mr. Nasher, having thoroughly enjoyed the wooing, rejected the suitors… [This week,] the $70 million Nasher Sculpture Center, a smashing combination of indoor museum and outdoor environment built and owned by the Nasher Foundation, opens to the public.”

“On the one hand, the opening of the magnificent Nasher Sculpture Center and garden is a public event of international significance… But the sculpture center is also an intensely personal story of the marriage of Patsy Rabinowitz, daughter of a Dallas businessman, and Massachusetts-born Raymond Nasher, a self-made man, the son of Russian immigrants. It is the culmination of their remarkable collecting partnership that ended prematurely with Patsy Nasher’s death from cancer in 1988 at age 59.”

LA’s new Disney Hall is “indeed a dynamic sculpture in the cityscape, but it entices rather than asserts. Its lilting abstract geometries flow seamlessly into one another, and its billowing walls, pieced together out of 10-by-4-foot sheets of stainless steel, seem alternately to reflect and absorb the changing natural light. And then there is the 2,265-seat concert hall itself, a surprise within a surprise, a spacious cocoon of rotund wooden forms with seating all around the orchestral stage.”

“A powerful argument can be made that the most exciting art in the world is being made by Chinese artists – most younger than 40 – who work in their homeland or have immigrated elsewhere… China has emerged from the intellectual repression of the Cultural Revolution to become an economic tiger ready to assert its place in the world. And that sometimes tumultuous transformation has sparked an incredible explosion of creativity.”

A new $20 million art education center on the campus of the Maryland Institute College of Art is big, futuristic, and chock full of the kind of cutting-edge sub-disciplines that didn’t even exist a decade ago. The just-completed Brown Center “will house newly created departments in fields such as digital imagery, video, animation, interactive media and graphic design… With the Brown Center, administrators aim to position MICA as a leading art school for art and digital technology studies.”

“A collection of 18th century paintings featuring Canadian landscapes has been discovered in a basement at Oxford University. It will go to auction next month. The paintings – possibly the earliest renderings of Quebec in existence – were the work of British army officer Major-General Benjamin Fisher.” The watercolors were painted in the late 18th century, when Fisher was instructed to survey the Canadian shore, and send documentary evidence of its contours back to Great Britain. The paintings are of more historical than artistic significance, but they are expected to fetch as much as CAN$100,000 at auction.

An artist has covered a church in London in grass. From the inside. “The walls of the church – indeed, every vertical surface, including doors and the railings around the organ loft – are covered in grass. It is a pelt-like, sensual second skin, and the first thing you want to do is reach out and touch it. The blades are superfine and delicate, damp and slightly resistant to the touch. This is nothing like a groomed, respectable, well-kept British lawn, nor a disciplined, close-shaved grass court or golf course. It is something altogether wilder and stranger.”

“Pardon visitors to this King County library branch if they can’t quite get a fix on the new addition to the art collection: One minute it’s a Winslow Homer, a few minutes later it’s a Cezanne, and then a Latour. They’re among the first to experience high-resolution digital art delivered by Seattle startup RGB Labs through its just-launched GalleryPlayer, a software-hardware service that provides secure delivery of copyright art directly to plasma screens. Designed primarily for corporate or public-space use, for $195 a month… the GalleryPlayer service delivers digital galleries of art displayed in intervals of 15 to 25 minutes.”