Category: visual

To qualify for “the world’s most important prize for high-rises,” buildings have to present at least 100 m (328 ft) in height and must have been completed in the previous two years.

“For an artist obsessed for nearly half a century with the concepts of maintenance and sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles keeps an office in desperate need of a cleaning. Or maybe an intervention by a department of doctoral students.”

“The work, dubbed the Love Plane, was painted in 2011 and showed a biplane leaving a heart-shaped trail behind it. The plane has now been removed from the wall of the outdoor car park on Rumford Street – but the heart has remained. The plane will be displayed alongside other Banksy works from Liverpool in an indoor gallery specialising in street art in the city’s Baltic Triangle.”

“The whole eyesore would almost be acceptable, in a humorous, nihilistic kind of way, if we didn’t know just how much money was going down the drain on this. To repeat, it will be a full $150 million—or $200 million if you factor in the money going toward the surrounding park. (Given Heatherwick’s apparent penchant for cost overruns, who knows just how high that price will soar, though?) This project comes about at a time when many of New York’s largest museums have been struggling financially.”

Several major museums have rehung their permanent collections in the past year, looking for alternative versions of the stories they tell. “The inclusion of such works, rescued from deep storage—if they were even collected at all—serves as an important historical corrective, giving certain artists a belated recognition and blurring the familiar borders of canonical movements.”

“The Internet loves optical illusions. Why? Because the Internet is a network of bored cubicle-browsers in search of ways to pass the time. … We’ve rounded up the most viral optical illusions of the year thus far, in all their mind-bendy glory.” (At left: “Disappearing Dots”.)

“‘One had to apologise for the late work,’ [Museum of Fine Arts, Houston director Gary Tinterow] says. ‘It was thought to be that of an old man who could no longer draw, or a reflection of frustration and a loss of manual dexterity.’ [Curator Henri] Loyrette is even more blunt: ‘People said Degas was a blind man.’ It took time and scholarship and subsequent exhibitions, but that feeling has largely dissipated.”