Category: visual

A Times 360 video tour of the exuberant architecture of Freddy Mamani Silvestre, a Bolivian architect whose house designs for the world’s highest city (El Alto, at 14,000 feet, sits on a plateau above La Paz) incorporate visual motifs and colors from the indigenous Aymara culture.

Philip Kennicott: “Every resource of museum design and careful argumentation has been mustered to sweep up these unrelated ideas in one, big, overwhelming package. This has implications for people in the museum business. The Bible Museum has come to town, in all its technical splendor, bearing with it something that most historians and museum professionals may have thought was long discredited: the “master narrative” idea of history, that there is one sweeping human story that needs to be told, a story that is still unfolding and carrying us along with it.”

“The photographer Gianfranco Gorgoni … says he was not properly credited or paid when his photographs of the land art project in California were used in a 2007 exhibition and book, and is seeking recognition for his work.”

It is tempting to believe that we live in a time uniquely saturated with images. And indeed, the numbers are staggering: Instagrammers upload about 95 million photos and videos every day. A quarter of Americans use the app, and the vast majority of them are under 40. Because Instagram skews so much younger than Facebook or Twitter, it is where “tastemakers” and “influencers” now live online, and where their audiences spend hours each day making and absorbing visual content. But so much of what seems bleeding edge may well be old hat; the trends, behaviors, and modes of perception and living that so many op-ed columnists and TED-talk gurus attribute to smartphones and other technological advances are rooted in the much older aesthetic of the picturesque.

Jori Finkel: “It turns out that half a minute is not enough time to experience the most powerful dynamic of these rooms: our shifting perceptions of what is far versus near, or personal versus universal, as one collapses into the other through the unending regression of mirrored images. … The Hirshhorn, The Broad and other venues have essentially decided to give twice as many people half as much art, with what you might call infinitely diminished returns.”

For years, artist Serkan Özkaya has been fascinated by Duchamp’s Etant données, the darkened room you view through peepholes in the closed door. He wanted to know exactly how it works, but the curators at the its home, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, aren’t allowed to go in and inspect its mechanisms themselves, let alone allowing a stranger access. So Özkaya did it Ikea-style.

“The Colombian artist’s 57cm-high sculpture, Maternity (2003), of a mother sitting on a plinth and cradling her baby, … was stolen from Galerie Bartoux in an upmarket district of Paris earlier this month in broad daylight. Gallery staff became aware of the theft only when they prepared to close the gallery.”