Category: visual

Researchers have found that, all over the globe, some shade or other of blue is the most widely beloved hue. But that preference does not appear to be based in genetics or otherwise hard-wired – the reasons lie elsewhere.

“The British Museum is embarking on what could be the most far-ranging redisplay of its collection for more than 150 years. In his first in-depth interview since taking over as director in April 2016, Hartwig Fischer has revealed plans to reorganise and revitalise what could amount to half of the museum’s 95 galleries.”

Among the nominees for Britain’s worst new building of the year are a couple that look sort of like actual carbuncles, if carbuncles had right angles.

“Britain withdrew from the subcontinent seventy years ago this month, creating, amid the bloodshed of Partition, the independent states of India and Pakistan. (They came into being at the famous stroke of midnight, the moment when Britain withdrew its sovereignty.) The imperial statues in New Delhi presented a dilemma; compared with the challenges of poverty, industrialization, and the desire to consolidate a constitutional democracy, they were a minor irritant, but a highly visible one.”

The facility, in a former Kraft Foods factory about a mile and a half from the main museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, “will be known as the Momentary and will showcase visual and performing arts. It also will house an art[ist]-in-residency program.”

“Jaime Colsa owns a transport company that delivers ordinary consumer goods – computers, food, drinks. The contents of his trucks aren’t eye-catching, but his vehicles certainly are, adorned with paintings showing cartoonlike faces, dogs, brightly colored geometric patterns, spirals and landscapes.”

“Looking for years for land art that utilizes the environment as complexly as artists have long done with their subjects through paint (even using paint as a subject), I’ve come up largely disappointed. Land artworks are typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no deep understanding (geologic, ecologic, botanic, etc.) of the materials they are using. Instead, artists who make these works favor aesthetic, surface-level intervention, which documents well for exhibition and (hopefully) sale later, upon return to an art-world setting, be it via a gallery or a coffee table book. Where is the communion with the land’s complexity?”

A pair of Berlin artists launched stusu (from “studio” and “sublet”) last year as “a website that culls together information on available studio spaces and ultimately makes it easier for artists to seek out inspiration abroad and create work in cities beyond their hometowns.”