Category: visual

“At the beginning and end of the program, all of the students took a series of tests. They were asked to describe, in detail, images that depicted artworks, retinas, and the faces of patients suffering from various eye-related diseases. The observational skills of the 18 students who took the art course increased significantly over the three months. Somewhat surprisingly, those of the 18 who did not take it actually declined during that same period.”

“What is so obvious to me – a professional photographer – as well as colleagues, photography bloggers and social media users, was not obvious to Nikon. Instead, it seemed to have worked on the campaign, from the concept stage through to development, marketing and public relations, without a thought for its female clients.”

“Tinkering with Austen’s image has a long history. According to Kathryn Sutherland and Freya Johnston in Teenage Writings, their new edition of her juvenilia, even writing that Austen never intended to publish didn’t escape others’ propensity to touch it up.”

“It can remind us of a place, a smell, a time of year, a person; our memories and cultures are filled with colour associations. They can even have different meanings from one culture to another. For example, in Japanese culture, yellow represents bravery and wealth, whilst in France the same colour represents jealousy and betrayal. In many cultures, blue represents masculinity, whereas it is considered a feminine colour in China. And red – the colour of danger, passion, love and fear in countless western cultures – is actually symbolic of mourning in South Africa.”

What we think of as a camera is largely a collection of software algorithms that expands with each passing year.

“Whether appearing as a drug or disease, the visual language of the Northern Renaissance was clearly influenced by the ergot fungus. Further research into this historical intersection will offer a better understanding of the way artists have responded to forces of temptation and torment with visual representation and might do so in the present day.”

Institutions like the British Museum do not come about by accident. The idea of the public museum is an “artifact of imperial enlightenment,” writes James Delbourgo in his new book, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. “Only a collector at the center of an empire could draw so many things together in order to tell them apart, in an astonishing attempt to catalogue the entire world.”

“Nobody thought that the electricity bill in Athens would be horrendously high because the exhibition venues had to be cooled from 40 degrees outside temperature to 23 degrees. Immensely expensive were also the transports of the works of art from Athens to Kassel.”

“We feel that casting a false shadow of criticism and scandal over documenta 14 does a disservice to the work that the artistic director and his team have put into this exhibition. Shaming through debt is an ancient financial warfare technique; these terms of assessment have nothing to do with what the curators have made possible, and what the artists have actually done within this exhibition.”

“Attendance to the fair, especially by Parisians just back from the summer holidays, was notably lower that previous years and far from that of Frieze Masters in London or Tefaf Maastricht. In the middle of the week, late in the day, the aisles were almost empty. The organisers did not provide attendance figures or information on sales, but the press reviews have been grim.”