Category: visual

According to Stephan Trüby, a professor of architecture at the University of Stuttgart, the Garrison church plan is an example of what he claims is now a disturbing pattern. “We can currently witness a cultural tendency of using seemingly harmless terms like identity’, ‘tradition’ and ‘beauty’ to establish an idea of ethnic purity protected by a fortress Europe,” he says. Elsewhere, writers wield terms such as heimat (home) and boden (soil/earth), which have both a long tradition in German thought and specific far-right meanings.

“I get why the city sees a solution in selling the work. How else can a bureaucracy generate so much cash so quickly from such a modestly sized asset? But it also perpetuates a disturbing mentality that I’ve found myself writing about again and again this year: namely, that culture—particularly in underserved neighborhoods—is only a priority if and when the costs can be covered by private-sector patrons.”

The ever-elusive, ever-inventive Banksy has once again made a fool of the art world, and captivated millions. But has the joke itself slightly self-destructed? Banksy’s remotely shredded “Girl With Balloon” was meant to poke fun at the excesses of the auction market. Yet thanks to the huge amount of publicity generated by this ingenious prank, his prices look set to soar even higher.

The painting is “Knowledge and Wonder,” a dreamlike frieze that the artist completed in 1995 for the Legler branch of the Chicago Public Library — on the city’s poorer West Side, where African-Americans make up about 44 percent of the population. This week, Rahm Emanuel announced that the library would sell the painting at Christie’s with the proceeds — the estimate is $10 million to $15 million — earmarked to expand library services to the same level as other major branches.

The work, “Girl With Balloon,” a 2006 spray paint on canvas, was the last lot of Sotheby’s “Frieze Week” evening contemporary art sale. After competition between two telephone bidders, it was hammered down by the auctioneer Oliver Barker for 1 million pounds, more than three times the estimate and a new auction high for a work solely by the artist, according to Sotheby’s. “Then we heard an alarm go off,” Morgan Long, the head of art investment at the London-based advisory firm Fine Art Group, who was sitting in the front row of the room, said in an interview on Saturday. “Everyone turned round, and the picture had slipped through its frame.”

“Upload a photo, define what you’d like to see removed, and [MIT Media Lab’s] Deep Angel will try to seamlessly erase whatever it is you want gone. The purpose of all this … is part media literacy, part experiment. Normally, the power to disappear people from images and the public record has only been wielded by governments, powerful heads of state and folks who crop others out of their profile pictures. Deep Angel, hopefully, will get you thinking about what it means to actually have the power to easily and seamlessly control what appears in images and what cannot.” (Uh-huh. Hopefully.)

And no, it’s not for graffiti. (Just imagine Disney graffiti.) “PaintCopter [is] a drone that can autonomously spray paint both flat and 3D surfaces. Disney Research says the goal is to be able to paint large surfaces without the need for scaffolding and ladders. … You can see the drone in action in the video below, and while its painting skills still leave a bit to be desired, you can imagine where this work is headed.”