Category: visual

So this is going well: “Hastings residents accuse [owner Sheikh Abid] Gulzar of cheapening the listed Victorian structure with plans for an amusement arcade and the installation of gold-painted fibreglass animals, including an elk, a bison and a baby hippopotamus.” – The Guardian (UK)

For instance, there was the 1943 Cine Metropolitan, a movie theatre where a couple of key Roma scenes take place. “‘Cinemas were like this,’ he says reverently. ‘When I was a kid I would love to arrive 10 to 15 minutes before the beginning of the movie to see the curtain opening slowly and the expectation of what you are going to see next.'” – Los Angeles Times

Many tribal art dealers feel that their work in restoring and preserving pieces, documenting information about them and helping to establish collections, has been misrepresented and point to the lack of a legal framework around restitution.  – The Art Newspaper

“New York’s Supreme Court has dismissed a case against [the magazine and its] former publisher, Knight Landesman, whom curator and art fair director Amanda Schmitt claimed had sexually harassed her via ‘unwelcome physical contact and repulsive written and oral demands for intimacy’ while she was an employee at the magazine.” (Landesman resigned the day the suit was made public.) — ARTnews

Eike Schmidt, who is German himself, said Berlin had a moral duty to give back the painting, Vase of Flowers, by the 18^th century Dutch artist Jan van Huysum. It was looted from Florence by German soldiers in 1944 and is now owned privately by a German family. – The Telegraph (UK)

Apollo editor Thomas Marks: “Restitution often feels like a disquieting concept for many Western museum-goers (myself included), for whom the values one invests in museums are unlikely to correlate with the political or intellectual projects that led to the formation of their collections.” (In other words, don’t punish museums now for what collectors did back then.) Even so, “90% of the material cultural legacy of sub-Saharan Africa remains preserved and housed outside of the African continent.” — Apollo

There are 15 buildings designed by the Brazilian architect in the 1960s for what was meant to be a permanent international expo in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli. The civil war that started in the ’70s forced planners to abandon the project, and it’s been more or less abandoned ever since. But now that Tripoli is finally reviving, there’s a campaign to revive and rebuild Niemeyer’s complex. — The Guardian

An artist calling himself Frizk says that he snuck a Banksy painting of a half-peeled banana onto the wall of the Mamma Andersson: Memory Banks exhibition at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center. (The Banksy was meant to fit in and not be noticed, but it was spotted quite promptly.) — Hyperallergic