Category: visual

“Who was really in charge of the undertaking remained a persistent and vexing question. As the latest studies make abundantly clear, the transformation of the World Trade Center site was hampered to a shameful degree by the intransigent self-interest of both individuals and institutions. As a result, an effort ostensibly meant to display our country’s unified spirit in response to an unprecedented calamity instead revealed that communal altruism of the sort that helped America to survive the Great Depression and triumph in World War II had largely become a thing of the past. Although all major construction schemes face tremendous problems, the World Trade Center rebuilding encapsulates everything that is wrong with urban development in a period when, as in so many other aspects of our public life, the good of the many is sacrificed to the gain of the few.”

Bill Arnett says he believes that Thornton Dial, Lonnie Holley and others aren’t just great artists; he argues that in a colorblind world, they’d be held in the same esteem as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Willem de Kooning. He’s been so aggressive making this argument that more than once he’s been kicked out of museums. But there are those who appreciate his unyielding passion.

Fernando Donis, a former associate of Rem Koolhaas at OMA (the CCTV headquarters in Beijing is his design), had hoped that the new Dubai Frame, which he won an international competition to design, would be his grand debut under his own name. Instead, he maintains, the emirate has stolen his copyright and frozen him out of the project.

“A number of high-profile institutions are actively attempting to redress gender disparity in their collections, exhibitions, and leadership. On International Women’s Day, we celebrate a few of the most noteworthy recent initiatives around the world.”

“The neural nets that we trained here are the beginning of counting oil tanks, or buildings, or windmills. Imagine we wanted to look at sustainable energy infrastructure—solar farms, solar panels on roof—you could start to think about counting their growth through time. You start to get really interesting data streams.”

“Historic restoration should not simply recreate what has been lost. Instead, it could deepen engagement with history and increase concern for the preservation of artefacts. A broader understanding of cultural heritage presses beyond the mere celebration of ancient objects to a more critical awareness of our connection with history. The aim of historic restoration is not to recover material authenticity, but to restore our relationship with the past.”

“These pointillist creations of early modern humans were recently discovered when scientists revisited Abri Cellier, a cave site in France’s Vézère Valley. There, they found 16 limestone tablets left behind by a previous excavation. Images of what appear to be animals, including a woolly mammoth, were formed by a series of punctured dots and, in some cases, carved connecting lines. Combined with previous images from nearby caves in France and Spain, the tablets suggest an early form of pointillism, and a very early point on art history’s timeline.”

Yes, indeed – it was first developed by an ornithologist in 1886; he expanded it for the rest of us in 1912. Allison Meier explains.

“There’s been no shortage of controversy and speculation around the Nebra Sky Disk since it was … exhumed illegally in 1999 in Nebra in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. …”