Category: visual

India’s Ajanta paintings, which easily rank among the world’s most precious heritage sites, are being restored. But a leading expert warns that “the cleaning methods employed at the caves and the level of skills of the workers engaged in the cleaning have seriously damaged the Ajanta paintings and led to a demonstrable loss of pigment.” – The Art Newspaper

“Artists who think they are up-to-date, just because they use digital technologies, are making a “critical error. Many new areas of research are bubbling that cry out for artistic attention, such as ‘biosensors’ that can alter the senses of touch and taste.” – Wired

The British Stirling Prize for architecture has been awarded, and good luck to them all. “I don’t want to sound curmudgeonly, but I don’t get the Stirling prize and I’m not sure what good it does architecture. True, everyone likes a prize. Remember Alice in Wonderland, when the Dodo organised a caucus race for the animals? After they had run around in circles for a bit, the Dodo decided that ‘everybody has won and all must have prizes’.” – The Guardian

“The world has spread the rumor that post-communist culture only uses its newly-won freedom to ape western strategies, that it is no longer fundamentally distinguishable from what we know as western art. The exhibition from Stockholm’s Moderna Museet now on display in Berlin succeeds in proving the contrary. Eastern Europe is still a separate continent.” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

China is said to be near to signing a pact with the US on reducing the flow of smuggled art. “This would include obligations on the US to prevent museums and similar institutions from acquiring illegally exported cultural property from China; a prohibition of the import into the US of Chinese cultural property stolen from a museum, public monument, or institution; and the mandatory return of such items once found in the US.” – The Art Newspaper

“A recently released study shows that 43-percent of Americans consider museums to be ‘more trustworthy’ than any other information source.” In second place, cited by 18 percent of the respondents, were books. – Write News

The newly-opened National Hispanic Cultural Center of New Mexico in Albuquerque was “designed to show off the multiplicity of cultures gathered under the umbrella term ‘Hispanic.’ The design of the complex makes that clear with a melange of Aztec, Mayan, Pueblo, modernist and Spanish idioms.” – Dallas Morning News

“You can choose not to watch a television show. But bad architecture, whether it is a hulking condominium tower or a gargantuan “McMansion” home that looms over its neighbors, is much harder to avoid. And it doesn’t go away for decades. That’s why, in today’s building boom, the fight to preserve the past is taking on urgent meaning. Instead of watching passively from the sidelines, more and more people are becoming involved in an attempt to control the character of their communities.” – Chicago Tribune

Two French boys who used pins to tack a “poster” to their bedroom wall, discover that the picture may be a previously unknown Delacroix and worth £3 million. – The Mirror (UK)

In Toronto, a quiet revolution in the way art galleries are presenting their work. “The new dealers tend to hunt out work they like, then simply hang it on the wall to see what happens.” That means mixing artists and group shows. ” Instead of having to come to grips with a single body of work, take it or leave it, customers now had a menu of art options to browse through, as in any other store. And that seemed to make them feel at home, and readier to buy.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)