Category: visual

“Australia’s biggest city might finally be mastering the art of medium and high-density living with a ‘characteristically Sydney’ style of housing. This is the verdict of the jury for this year’s Royal Australian Institute of Architects’ awards. But sometimes you have to look in unlikely places for this brave new face of Sydney.”

For too long, says Simon Beer, museums have viewed technology as an unfortunate competitor for their high-minded offerings, and computers as the brain-sucking mechanism that was forcing them to ‘dumb down’ their exhibits. But “the misconception that technology simply means computers is giving way to the realisation that using technology creatively can bring the nation’s past to life and communicate with a much wider audience.”

“A few decades ago, art lovers visiting an art museum for the first time would invariably ask, ‘Where are the best pictures that you own?’ But over the last 25 years or so, they’ve been trained to ask instead, ‘What exhibitions do you have on view right now?’ Museums have become more and more preoccupied, even obsessed, with their rosters of temporary shows… The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian Institution’s repository for modern and contemporary art, has caught on to this new reality, acknowledged it as a problem, and set out to do something about it.”

Comic books are a booming business, and despite technological and marketing advances in the decades since the genre first burst upon the scene, superhero stories are much the same as they ever were. Good battles evil, and good wins nine times out of ten. Brooding crusaders in masks and (let’s face it) ridiculously inconvenient capes swoop about densely populated cities like flying cat burglars, and no one but the bad guys ever takes a shot at them. And after countless battles, endless fistfights, and millions upon millions of horrible puns, nearly all the heroes are still white, and most of the women are, to but it bluntly, ridiculously top-heavy. Will comic books ever get with the times?

The Barnes Collection, a stunning private-turned-public accumulation of Renoirs, Mattisses, and other masterpieces housed in a Philadelphia suburb, has been in dire financial straits for quite some time, and a new book details the chaotic mess that has led the Barnes to such a desperate state. But author John Anderson is not interested in merely laying out a history of mismanagement. His book also points towards what is yet to come – the likely appropriation of the Barnes treasures by the city’s political and cultural elites, who have a history with this sort of thing, and who have long been strangely irked by the legacy left behind by Alfred Barnes.

“The Guggenheim Foundation and the mayor of Taichung, Jason Hu, have unveiled a proposal for a new Guggenheim Museum in Taichung, Taiwan. Plans for a spectacular new building have already been designed by the world-renowned deconstructionist architect Zaha Hadid… [T]he museum would be part of a larger cultural complex to include an opera house designed by Jean Nouvel, who designed the proposed Rio de Janeiro Guggenheim, and a new Taichung City Hall to be designed by Frank Gehry… This is the Guggenheim Foundation’s fifth attempt to open a museum in Asia, four plans for Japan having failed, and is the latest of a series of proposed Guggenheim’s throughout the world.”

“The Taiwanese city of Taichung is the latest to pin its hopes for international cultural recognition and economic regeneration on the Guggenheim Foundation. The plan is for a trademark signature museum building, this time an eye-catching design with moveable sections by architect Zaha Hadid, an opera house and other cultural projects. The Guggenheim will decide in September whether to approve the plan, but these are uncertain times.”

“The Los Angeles County Museum of Art said its upcoming exhibition of a major art collection from the State Pushkin Museum, Moscow, would open as planned July 27 — despite a lawsuit, filed against the museum by the grandson of a Russian aristocrat, which alleges that 25 of the works in the collection were looted from his family by Lenin’s Bolshevik government in 1918.”

“The Cincinnati Art Museum announced Wednesday a joint exhibition with the American Museum of Natural History in New York of 200 objects from the southern Jordanian city of Petra. Presented under the patronage of Queen Rania of Jordan, Petra: Lost City of Stone is the first major cultural collaboration between Jordan and the United States… The exhibition’s more than 200 objects include stone sculptures and reliefs, ceramics, metalwork, stuccowork, ancient inscriptions and a selection of 25 paintings, drawings and prints from the 19th century.”

A new exhibition by a British graffiti artist features live sheep, cows, and pigs painted with various outlandish designs. “The exhibition includes pigs painted in police colours, sheep painted in concentration camp stripes and a cow covered in images of Andy Warhol’s face.” Animal control organizations have approved the exhibit, and the animal are all show animals used to being stared at. Still, it’s probably a good thing that the sheep can’t tell what’s been painted on his back…