Category: visual

A retired teacher who defaced a painting at last year’s controversial “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum says it was his constitutional right to do so. “It was his response to an obscenity against his beloved Virgin Mary. He was offended by the nature of that painting, and that’s what the museum wanted.” – New York Daily News

Vienna’s Holocaust Memorial, designed by sculptor Rachel Whiteread, has courted controversy since its inception and will finally be unveiled next week. “It is a library, but it looks like a bunker. I was thinking of brutalist architecture, but I tried to make something sombre and poetic.”- The Guardian

Ottawa’s National Gallery of Canada recently landed a $20 million private collection of Chinese and Mid-Eastern antiquities, and the donation was seen as quite a coup. But now, after giving the some 1,800 objects to the museum, the donor has abruptly demanded them back. “They couldn’t meet the conditions that I imposed. They weren’t able to meet it, so we said, screw it.” The museum has been under ongoing financial difficulties. – Ottawa Citizen

Australian artist  John Perceval, a member of the group of Melbourne artists known in the 1940s as the “Angry Penguins,” has died at the age of 77. The group developed modern painting techniques generally unfamiliar to Australia at the time. – Sydney Morning Herald

An enormous Etruscan city dating from the 5th Century BC has been unearthed under a plain in Tuscany. Workers were excavating for a new truck yard. – Discovery

Why did Mayan culture collapse centuries ago? New large archaeological finds in Central America are filling in the puzzle. “Some estimates put the Maya population in the lowland jungles at a staggering 500 people per square mile, roughly twice the current density in Florida. Just before the collapse there are more Maya around then ever before, and they’re packed into cities that are larger, more numerous, and more closely spaced. The slightest added stress could have precipitated a catastrophic spiral of collapse. A drought, war, or crop failure could have pushed the society over the edge.” – Chronicle of Higher Education

Some British museums are having difficulty convincing their governing boards that adding to their collections is an important thing to do. “A fashionable theory that objects are less important than visitors’ experiences, and that collecting is little more than elitist hoarding, is now in vogue among some museum governing bodies.” – The Telegraph (UK)

Over the next few months scientists will be tracking the eye movements of thousands of visitors to an exhibition at the National Gallery in London. “It will be the biggest investigation ever carried out into how humans absorb images and how artists’ use of colour and texture affects the way a painting ‘works’.” – The Independent (UK)

Design is hot right now – it has a grip on the popular imagination in a way it hasn’t since the 1960s. What does it mean for the way we think about the things around us? “As expressions of The New, these products have inherited the myth of progress, modernity’s defining legend. This is not the first time design has embodied that myth… – New York Times

Germany has long suspected that many of the artworks taken by the Soviets from Germany at the end of World War II and listed as ‘lost’ were in fact living in Russian museums. “After 55 Years, German officials get to take a brief look at looted art from Berlin’s Museum of East Asian Art. Important works categorized as “irreplaceable” and once believed to be lost forever were among the treasures.” – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung