Category: visual

“Even when we chose them, personalized them, they were just there – artworks that we rarely thought of as art, partly because we never knew the names of the artists who had made them. The best examples of the genre underscored this sentiment by pushing back against the fact of conscious human design.” Jacob Brogan offers a history of screen savers and an explanation (for you young’uns) of why they were necessary and why we now so rarely see them.

“The messages that are sent out have a completely unbalanced emphasis on contemporary art, as if somehow the crowds that come to the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue—where people go to see Egyptian, Greek, and Islamic Art and great European paintings—are suddenly going to come to see contemporary art. This when there are a thousand commercial galleries all over New York, and how many museums with contemporary art? It’s nonsense.”

Condo developer Uri Vaknin: “Already a world-renowned dining, entertainment and shopping capital, our city is now becoming a cultural hub. The openings of The Smith Center for the Performing Arts, The Mob Museum and the Neon Museum signals a clear move in that direction. Yet, I remain dumbfounded that Las Vegas lacks a world-class art museum.”

Ten days before her art school’s graduate exhibition opened, Rotem Bides claimed that the objects in her installation in the show had been taken from the museum at the Auschwitz-Birkenau prison camp. All hell broke loose, and her work was about to be removed – then she released a statement swearing that the items had not been taken from the Auschwitz museum itself.

Academicians warned decades ago that “the restrictive control of the master’s archives for a quarter-century after his death in 1959 by his widow, Olgivanna (who died in 1985), would set back Wright studies for a full generation, if not longer. Dissertation advisers prudently steered doctoral candidates away from Wright topics because of the extortionate research and reproduction fees demanded by his foundation, as well as the editorial approval it demanded for publications that used material from the Taliesin archive. The rise of poststructuralist criticism further eroded younger scholars’ interest in an architect whose uniquely personal approach to architecture had little to do with the period’s fascination with literary theory.”

“We’re all ’80s kids,” said David Dodde, co-owner and designer at House Industries. “We’re not inventing anything, we’re just stealing really well. It’s all about the honesty of the theft. In a way, we’re paying homage.”

Phineas Harper: “Across architectural culture we dread the label of unoriginality like a curse. We deride the derivative, we mock mimics, we fear facsimiles. Call us dull, call us sellouts, call us gentrifiers – just don’t call us copycats. I believe this sneering snobbery of derivation is deeply flawed and at odds with the potential of architecture as a collective creative force.” (For instance, Shigeru Ban is not the only architect allowed to use cardboard tubes.)

Justin Davidson: “Most of us can imagine only what we already know, and even the fantasies of visionary filmmakers can be astonishingly earthbound. The inventors of nonexistent cities don’t have to worry about building codes, zoning, financing regulations, or even the need to make their structures stand up. Rather than use that freedom to unleash radical design or dream up darkly beautiful architecture, they simply recycle the present and make it bigger, and worse.”

“Manhattan prosecutors have taken custody of an ancient bull’s head that was on loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art because of concerns that the antiquity was looted from a Lebanese storage area in the 1980s during Lebanon’s civil war. … Last week, the Met surrendered an ancient vase that it bought at auction in 1989 because of concerns that it might have been looted from Italy.”

“Founded by Walmart heiress Alice Walton, currently the wealthiest woman in the United States, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened its doors in 2011, but despite a commendable five-year record of accomplishment, it remains a perplexing outlier among the country’s well-endowed art museums – and not just because, like Walton, it grew up in Northwest Arkansas.”