Category: visual

Though he’s famous for scaling buildings to steal from wealthy owners’ apartments, this was easier: “During several scouting visits, he discreetly sprayed the window’s mounts with acid so they could be easily dismantled later. Then, around 3 a.m. on May 20, 2010, he disassembled the window, removed the glass, cut the padlock and the chain of the metal grid behind it and entered the museum. The alarm systems remained silent.”

The museum houses more than 9500 pieces of Islamic art from all over the Islamic world. One professor of Islamic art history: “‘I think the reopening of the museum is extremely important because there’s been so much negative propaganda’ about Islam, she says. ‘I think it will show people that this was one of the most advanced cultures — and how better to see it than through art?'”

Tame Iti, a member of the Tūhoe Nation, returned from prison and shifted his focus to art: “Art is an intricate part of activism. To be an active participant, to try and provoke people’s thinking, to capture your audience. People that come and look at art, they’re looking for something. They’re looking for the moments, looking for the magic.”

Yikes. “Tension inside the Met, the country’s largest art museum, is running so high that when curators and conservators recently wrote a letter protesting compensation cuts, the museum’s leaders chose not to show it to trustees for fear of leaks and bad publicity. Those who wanted to see the document had to go to the office of the Met’s general counsel and read it under observation.”

With new technology, humans are building taller and taller residential – and luxury – skyscrapers. But “the payoff for peace and endless views can be five-minute waits for the lift at rush hour – and even sunburn. ‘You could get tanned in winter if you sat right by the window: there’s a bit of a greenhouse effect,’ the owner of a 64th-floor apartment above Chicago tells me. Vertigo can be another danger.”

It’s simply a relief: “Freed from the world, all you sense is your body moving through water and all you hear is the sound of your pulse inside your head. Contemplating abstract sculpture, you enter a relationship bereft of language, of story and of illustration; you have to simply measure yourself against the object and admire its intrusion.”

What’s going on in our brains when we see an authentic work versus a copy? Experts, it seems, tend to be right when they follow their initial “vibe,” an instinctual judgment call uncluttered by additional material. From my research into how forgers successfully hoodwinked experts, I know that it is usually the additional material (origin or discovery stories that push the right buttons, doctored or invented provenance) that passes off a forgery, when the object itself, if examined in a vacuum, shouldn’t fool anyone. In Gladwellian terms, this means that the smartest forgers plant clues that provoke “analysis paralysis” and encourage experts to overlook their “thin-slice” response: we might call it encouraging “thick-slicing.”

“Spanish-born architect Santiago Calatrava has designed a 24 metre-high (79ft) glass arcade with “winter garden” atrium for the complex, which will be topped by three towers, each rising more than 30 storeys above North Greenwich station, which is to be renamed Greenwich Peninsula.”

The initiative, which begins next month with an exhibition devoted to Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523-87), the first known female painter in Florence, grew out of a conversation between Uffizi director Eike Schmidt and the Guerrilla Girls.

At the Shah Cheragh in Shiraz, “mosaics made of mirror shards and tiles cover each wall. Glittering chandeliers hang from the ceilings and spots of light dance in the domes. As the above video by Great Big Story shows, being inside is like inhabiting a disco ball.”