Category: visual

“All colour photographs fade. According to best estimates, the average colour print has a shelf life of about 200 years. Now, in Basel, Switzerland, the Cesar Foundation, chaired by Claudio Cesar, an American photography collector who runs a company that specialises in coloured glass is trying to reverse this deterioration.”

One of Iraq’s National Museum’s most prized artifacts has been found and returned to the museum. “The 5000-year-old mask was “found after an intensive investigation by US troops and Iraqi police that led them to a farm just north of Baghdad. The Warka Mask was discovered buried under six inches of dirt, but has remained intact.”

An official sculpture made from steel of the fallen World Trade Center has been sold on the internet, infuriating relatives of victims of 9/11. “The 5-inch sculpture – one of nearly 3,000 created from mangled steel beams – sold for $255 in an auction on the eBay Web site last week. It wasn’t immediately clear how one of the sculptures – distributed exclusively to victims’ families – got into the hands of the company that hawked it on eBay.”

After 30 years, the iconic Sydney Opera House is having its interior redone by its original architect. Joern Utzon, now 85, was thrown off the project before the building was complete, and some of the interior was completed by others. Now he is getting the chance to see some of his original ideas take shape…

Is a Turner painting long thought to be of a scene in Venice really a picture of Portsmouth? “If Turner expert Ian Warrell is right those dark shapes in the smoky gold light are not glamourous revellers, jaded with the pleasures of the most beautiful and decadent city in the world, being ferried home at dawn across the Venetian lagoon. They’re a bevy of Portsmouth councillors, local dignitaries, layabouts, rubberneckers and riffraff, setting out in a little Armada across the harbour to meet the King of France, Louis-Philippe.”

A tiny band of West Coast Canadian indians wants a mask in the British Museum returned to them. “It would be good if getting back the mask would be precedent-setting so everybody who wants their pieces get them back. The people who live in this bucolic corner of Canada’s Pacific coast say retrieval of the mask — a beautifully carved and brightly painted crest that opens into a sullen, wide-eyed human face with what looks like sun rays protruding from around its circumference — is part of a broad effort to reverse a cultural theft by Christian missionaries and a series of Canadian governments.”

“Conservation experts are warning that a massive mound of soil stretching across 72 acres of the banks of the Yamuna river opposite the Taj Mahal could turn into a mudslide and flood the foundations of the 17th-century mausoleum. This disaster waiting to happen is the latest chapter in the sorry story of the mismanagement of the great Islamic building.”

The Louvre is looking for sponsors, as one of a series of reforms that requires museums to raise more of their own budgets. “The three main principles of the reforms are to give museums the freedom to manage money from entry tickets; full responsibility for their exhibition and display policies; and freedom to manage their acquisitions policy.”

A new art fair dedicated to contemporary art is opening in London. “It is a momentous occasion because London has never hosted a truly international contemporary art fair before. The fairs that did take place were considered either too provincial or too traditional in content. And there were not, it was argued, enough collectors in the UK to make the journey worthwhile.”

Sports venues are some of the most prominent architectural features of most American cities, and in the last ten years, there has been something of a renaissance in the manner in which ballparks and stadiums are designed. But in Chicago, where a newly refurbished Soldier Field is already being dubbed the “Eyesore on Lake Shore,” most of the lessons in how to properly combine modern functionality with classic form seem to have gone unlearned, says Blair Kamin.