The technique known as kintsugi (“golden seams”) or kintsukuroi (“golden repair”) developed in Japan around 500 years ago, and it’s still in use, and even spreading, today. As Casey Lesser reports, “not only has kintsugi been adopted and adapted by leading contemporary artists, these days, one can take kintsugi lessons and find self-help and wellness books that use it as a metaphor for embracing flaws and imperfections.”
Category: visual
Why Brutalist Architecture Doesn’t Work On Social Media
When Tumblr users reblog photographs of brutalist architecture, they turn them into pieces of furniture for their own pages. On Instagram, the effect of reblogging, or posting found images on a user’s feed, is to create of visual map to the user’s identity. There’s nothing wrong with this practice per se; it’s a very democratic way to access visual culture. But the social aspect to social media has turned the cultivation of aesthetics into an exercise in personal branding.
Rise Of The Instagram Museums
We might call this “new genre” the Instagram museum. Operating under the guise of installation art, its exhibits are seemingly designed to attract the kind of visitor whose main purpose for visiting is to share the photographic evidence of their visit on social media. The insta-museum arrives amidst an existential crisis for museums of old, which have, in recent years, tried everything from mini-golf to Snapchat in a bid to attract wider audiences.
Hoard Of Golden Treasure Found In Ancient Tomb In Kazakhstan
The burial mound, thought to be more than 2,000 years old and containing thousands of pieces of goldwork, was discovered in the Tarbagatai mountains near the Kazakh-Chinese border.
How Digital Image Manipulation Has Invaded The Culture
“For my generation, editing your own image has become as routine as using social media. We grew up with airbrushing and Photoshop and saw the exposés of flawless magazine cover stars who weren’t flawless at all. Instead of rejecting the falsehoods we’ve made it part of our daily lives, crafting idealised digital versions of ourselves that feel like an essential corollary to real life. Technology has set a new standard for beauty that quite literally doesn’t exist in real life. Rather than reject that, we’ve embraced it.”
A Scottish City Banks On A Jewel Of A New Museum
The new V&A museum opens in September. It marks the end of an eight-year undertaking that saw Dundee embark on one of the most important cultural projects Scotland has known. The spectacular new museum has been built on the city’s waterfront, the first to bear the imprint of the V&A outside London. Its Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, has said he wanted to “create a new living room for the city.”
Will US Tariffs Kill Sales Of Chinese Art?
The latest list of targeted Chinese goods ran to 205 pages. It included sand blasting machines; eels, fresh or chilled (excluding fillets); hats; and, at the bottom of the last page, paintings and drawings executed entirely by hand, original sculptures, and antiques more than 100 years old. The tariffs would apply to all artworks that originated in China, regardless of how they entered the United States. That means American buyers could be required to pay 25 percent more for a Ming dynasty bowl sold by a British owner at an auction in New York, as well as for a painting by a young Beijing-based artist at a gallery in Hong Kong.
An Enormous, Thrilling New Art Museum Opens Under An Old Bus Station Parking Lot
“Bulging white mounds rear up out of the ground in the middle of Helsinki, tapering to circular windows that point like cyclopean eyes around the square. Children scramble up the steep slopes while a skateboarder attempts to glide down one, past a couple posing for a selfie at the summit.” Oliver Wainwright visits the new Amos Rex museum in the Finnish capital.
Van Gogh’s Drawing Of ‘Starry Night’, Looted In World War II, Is Still Being Held In Russia
Investigative reporter Martin Bailey: “Vincent had made the drawing in 1889 in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole to send to Theo in Paris, to give his brother an idea of his painting … The drawing done for Theo had been donated to the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1918, but it was lost during the chaos of the Second World War. It was seized at a German castle by Victor Baldin, a Red Army officer who took it back to the Soviet Union on a tractor. For decades it remained hidden away and was recorded in the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné as ‘lost’. I can report that it is now almost certainly in a secret Russian government storage facility in Moscow.”
Despite Felony Conviction Of Its Founder, Brazil’s Great Sculpture Park Carries On
“It seemed like a potentially dispiriting blow: a government move to take over massive works of art, acres of land and multiple gallery buildings at the Inhotim Institute, a vast sculpture park and botanical garden in southeastern Brazil whose founder faces a prison sentence for laundering donations. Yet Inhotim is soldiering on despite the downfall of its creator, the mining tycoon Bernardo Paz.”