Category: visual

“No other modern-day leader has used the myth-making power of architecture to construct a sense of national identity like Nazarbayev,” says Frank Albo, author of a new book on the Kazakh capital, Astana: Architecture, Myth and Destiny. “What you see here is a blend of postmodernism, Central Asian art, Islamic decor, Russian baroque, neoclassicism, orientalism, all melded into something that looks like Las Vegas meets Disneyland on nationalist steroids.” In a bid to cast off the shackles of the Soviet era, the president has embraced practically everything else.

Why make art when buyers treat works as an alternative currency, hiding them away like bullion bars in storage facilities? Can anything be done about questionable corporations and oppressive regimes using contemporary art to generate a spot of positive PR for themselves? And what links can be made between fuzzy surveillance images and abstract art?

The prize-winning images, chosen by readers of Scientific American, play with our perceptions of shape, motion, and length. Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde talks with the three winners about how their illusions work.

The painting is estimated to fetch $100m (£75m) at auction next month. But “in a forthcoming study, Leonardo da Vinci: the Biography, Walter Isaacson questions why an artistic genius, scientist, inventor, and engineer showed an ‘unusual lapse or unwillingness’ to link art and science in depicting the orb.”

A few hours before right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 people dead at a summer camp outside the Norwegian capital in 2011, he left a car bomb in the city’s government district that killed eight and severely damaged two landmark Brutalist buildings which have been empty ever since. Now the Norwegian government plans to tear down and replace one of those buildings and relocate its two murals, created by Pablo Picasso with Carl Nesjar. “Opponents of the decision see it as an affront to Norwegian and global artistic heritage, and a capitulation to Mr. Breivik.” Says one official, “We don’t want the ministry to tear down the building when the terrorist didn’t manage to do that.”

“A group of major cultural institutions in the UK and Europe … is seeking a way to end decades of wrangling over the estimated 4,000 bronze and ivory artefacts looted by the British army from what is now southern Nigeria as part of a punitive expedition in 1897. Since the 1960s, Nigeria has repeatedly called for their repatriation.”

Paul Goldberger: “If, until now, we – architects, critics, building dwellers – have had to guess what makes certain places attractive or comfortable or exciting or awe-inspiring, we now have some scientific basis for our reactions: what [Sarah Williams] Goldhagen calls a new paradigm, which ‘holds that much of what and how people think is a function of our living in the kinds of bodies we do.'”

The piece is a fiberglass sculpture of a daybed, the pinnacle of “The Road to Hollywood,” a large and complex installation by artist Erika Rothenberg. It was removed Thursday from its perch at Hollywood & Highland, the shopping mall adjacent to the theater where the Academy Awards are handed out. In the eyes of some, an innocuous daybed became a casting couch.

As part of “Secret Stans”, a series about the cities of the little-known former Soviet republics of Central Asia, Oliver Wainwright visits Astana, Kazakhstan, where president-for-life Nursultan Nazarbayev brought in the likes of Norman Foster and Santiago Calatrava to create a futuristic capital city from scratch.

A photo tour of the strange and fabulous (in more than one sense) buildings that have gone up in the cities of Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan, where the dictators were not going to let themselves be outdone.