Category: visual

“Staff of the State Russian Museum are taking legal action to protest against the imminent $17m reconstruction of its main building, the Mikhailovsky Palace in St. Petersburg.They argue that the project has not been properly vetted and threatens both the 19th-century structure … and one of the world’s most important collections of Russian art.” — The Art Newspaper

We ranked each institution based on its “centrality” a mathematical concept drawn from Network Science and one that is at the core of the Google search ranking algorithm. We discovered that, among a large number of fairly ineffectual institutions, one hub stood out as truly transformative. The most central in this hub were two museums, the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim, followed closely by two commercial galleries, Gagosian, and Pace. – ARTnews

Boxy shapes, flat windows, bland façades. How did American apartment architecture get conquered by the style one wag calls “Spongebuild Squareparts”? Reporter Patrick Sisson writes that “it boils down to code, costs, and craft.” — Curbed

“In a keynote speech at the World Architecture Festival in Amsterdam [in late November], [David] Adjaye said that architecture should be the ‘arbiter of ideas’, yet many of today’s projects are driven by ‘elitism that is to do with hyper-commercial liberalism and who controls money’.” — Dezeen

The opening of the renovated and reorganized (with some input from Belgium’s African community) museum moved Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to call for objects taken during the colonial period to be returned for a new national museum in Kinshasa. — The Guardian

“Artworks were compromised,” museum spokesperson Shadia Lemus told Westword. “The individual was arrested at the museum and taken into police custody.” Whether the destruction of the works was some sort of artistic statement or just “a teenager on drugs,” as one museum visitor suggested, has not been determined. – Westword

The protest, organized by a group called Decolonize This Place, was to demand the resignation of the museum’s vice chairman, Warren B. Kanders, 12 days after it was revealed by the website Hyperallergic that he is also the owner, chairman, and CEO of the company Safariland, which manufactures law enforcement gear—including the tear gas reportedly being used on migrants at the southern border. – The Daily Beast

If an artist is supposed to propose new ways of seeing and creating, it’s worrying when social media platforms feel like they’re turning us all into sycophantic clones. – New York Magazine