Category: visual

The basic problem is not that it gets climbed upon or graffiti’d or messed up by the public it’s supposed to engage. It’s that people don’t care.

The student union building, slated for possible destruction, isn’t ordinary, says Rowan Moore. It’s “a manmade terrain of rooms and spaces – large, intimate, sociable, secluded, high, low, top-lit, side-lit – which, grouped around a plunging and generous staircase, help you see the banks of green on the other side and feel the slopes of the ground. It is a way of being in the gorge while also – as a human being rather than a bird – using the facilities offered to human students.”

Marianne North traveled around the world, dropping her easel anywhere – including in the thickest Brazilian rainforest – to paint the flora and fauna of the area. She bequeathed her oil paintings to Kew Gardens, and she designed a gallery to hold them as well.

Michael Govan of LACMA, about the Pacific Standard Time art festival opening in the fall, known as PST LA/LA (one of the LAs is for Latin America): “We have so much to do to make everyone understand how connected our cultures are — how connected we are. … There is no us and them. There is just us and us.”

There are the cities we have. And then there are the cities we might have had if only they had been been built. It’s probably no surprise that with all the imagination running rampant in Los Angeles, there are many fun proposed projects that never got built. Here are some of them…

J. Hoberman writes about the newly-rediscovered “comic strip” drawings, featuring a lead character called the Biped, that Richter drew in 1962, shortly after escaping from East to West Germany.

“The unsigned and undated work, Wedding Dance in the Open Air (1607-15), had been in store for several years when the [Holburne Museum in Bath’s] director, Jennifer Scott, decided to pull it out for a closer look.”

Security camera footage shows more than a dozen men in balaclavas bursting into Kiev’s Visual Culture Research Center, beating a guard, and destroying artist Davyd Chychkan’s show Lost Opportunity. They left behind holes in the walls and graffiti reading “Moscow’s mouthpiece,” “Glory to Ukraine,” and the like.

“Jen Graves, who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for criticism and a nominee for the best art reporting award from the U.S. section of the International Association of Art Critics, was an increasing rare entity: an art critic working full time at a major city newspaper. The number of people in that role has dwindled in recent years as the media business has struggled and publications have cut staff.”

“If Apple designs at its best when attending closely to details like those revealed in the construction of its spaceship headquarters, then presumably the details of its products would stand out as worthy precedents. Yet, when this premise is tested, it comes up wanting. In truth, Apple’s products hide a shambles of bad design under the perfection of sleek exteriors.”