Category: visual

The project has been plagued by shaky funding and construction delays. “Adjacent to the city’s spiffy new art museum along the Biscayne Bay waterfront, the Frost Science Museum features a 500,000-gallon aquarium that will house sharks, barracuda, tuna and sea turtles; an Everglades exhibit; a state-of-the-art planetarium; an exhibit on the evolution of flight from dinosaurs to jet fighters; and numerous labs, conference rooms and hands-on experiences.”

“Of course we realized how unlikely it was that a large bridge of our design might be chosen by the city, but we proceeded as if it could happen,” Oldenburg wrote in a statement on the project.

The donation, from the Walton Family Foundation – yes, the Waltons of Wal-Mart, and of the Crystal Bridges Museum – is the largest in the history of this Texas museum dedicated to American art.

“The 30,500 sq. m museum will be funded with a $450m donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the city’s biggest private charity. The Hong Kong outpost will likely have a contemporary style as it will be designed by Rocco Yim, the Hong Kong architect who designed the new Hong Kong government complex.”

“It is not just that it appears impossible to reach a consensus on important artists such as Modigliani. Nor is it the way the auction houses are discarding specialists at an alarming rate. Nor even the fact that key artistic Foundations (Warhol, Pollock and Lichtenstein) no longer provide an authenticating service. It is all this and more.”

“Just as the design of prisons can make rehabilitation easier or harder, and as school buildings influence how children learn, so offices mould the people who work in them. They make some kinds of interaction easy and others hard, which shapes the way of working. Over the years the building has shaped The Economist in several ways, some good, some less so.”

It’s true: “Between 1956 and 1958, the artists created a series of Surrealist-style window displays using materials such as leaves, flowers, fruit, dirt and sand … to showcase Tiffany’s iconic jewels.”

What’s Korean for chutzpah?

This New Year’s list is headed by the citizens of New Orleans, but it includes some perennials (adjunct professors) and at least one very small group (the “two or three bummed Helsinkians” who supported the now-dead Guggenheim proposal).