Category: visual

The world’s greatest art fair is underway in the Dutch town of Maastricht. This is the place for Old Master paintings. “About two-thirds of the world’s currently available supply of Dutch and Flemish Old Masters are for sale under a single roof, an irresistible magnet for collectors from all over the world.” But this year the fair is trying to widen its horizons, and a record number of dealers of 20th Century art are on hand. – The Telegraph (UK)

Architects have a responsibility to design buildings that look good but last long. “Buildings ought to last. They are not supposed to fall apart. They have to be able to take whatever pounding their users deliver. Or they have to be so beautiful or dignified that they all but insist that people treat them well.” – Chicago Tribune

The new Tate Bankside museum, scheduled to open this week, and the first new bridge across the Thames in a century,  won’t just change the experience of looking at art in London. They’ll change the city itself. – The Observer (UK)

Artists have been exploring images of the unclothed human body for centuries. But a new exploration of muscular women wanders outside the traditions. – New York Times

“Modern Trafalgar Square is a dump: Hayling Island with statues, cut off from the rest of London by the four-ring motorway that encircles it. The pigeons are right to deposit their opinions of it.” The now-famous Fourth Plinth project is “the smartest example of sculptural hype I can remember in London. I cannot imagine a more prominent urban showcase for new public sculpture than an empty platform in Trafalgar Square, opposite the National Gallery, and the wheeze of rotating the solutions on a regular basis means that nobody need ever worry unduly about the permanent impact of the results.” – The Sunday Times (UK)

A mountainous landfill, “25 million tons of trash piled as high as a 20-story building and stretching nearly a mile alongside the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway – a dump so huge, so rank, so grotesque and so in your face that it is now something more than a garbage heap – is the subject of a new museum show. – Washington Post

Investigators have discovered that auction houses Sotheby’s and Christie’s swapped confidential lists of super-rich clients. “The shared and overlapping lists of about 50 names which include some of the world’s wealthiest families were described as a crucial tool for auction houses to use in enforcing a form of price control in which certain customers were charged lower commissions, down to zero, that both houses honored.” – New York Times

One by one, Britain’s excuses for keeping the Elgin Marbles are melting away. Now a poll shows that a majority of members of the British Parliament would vote to return the marbles to Greece. – The Economist

The Museum of Modern Art continues with its look back at the history of 20th Century art. “There has been a concerted effort to level the playing field, to take modernism out of the hands of the anointed few and show it to be an effort of hundreds of people working alone or together in a range of styles and mediums.” – New York Times

— of the Hermitage Museum  come into play in Russian election. – The Art Newspaper