Category: visual

“Architects are once again fully engaged in the invention — and reinvention — of cultural landscapes, for the first time since the Great Recession sent many of these projects into flat files.”

“The more she explored the river, the more she uncovered. In the countryside near Oxford, she encountered a trio of female pagan revellers who dance by the river amid swirling trails of incense smoke. At Tilbury, she befriended a group of ship-spotters, who log the vessels that pass through the docks.”

“It was thought that there was something weaker about them because they were more thinly painted. And it was then that there was this sort of equation between these lightly painted pictures and her being a woman (though neither Mitchell nor Hartigan painted in this way). There were some people, like [critic] Harold Rosenberg, who was a big supporter of the idea of the painting being made out of heroic gestures. And with her work there are no gestures.”

“How did you engage with the liminal space between eggs and toast? It would seem to me like a particular challenge to explore.”

“The issue is hotly debated. For example, it’s often believed that open plan offices promote pro-social working and avoid the drab monotony of cubicle working, but other studies claim that it can instead be bad for productivity and wellbeing.”

“The Canadian province of British Columbia has dedicated C$2m in funding to establish a First Nations department and repatriation programme at the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria to help First Nations in the province recover their cultural heritage – including religious items and ancestral remains – scattered in museums across the world.”

“Beginning Thursday, after years of planning and digitizing, much of that archive will now be available on the museum’s website, moma.org, searchable so that visitors can time-travel to see what the museum looked like during its first big show (‘Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh,’ in the fall of 1929); during seminal exhibitions (Kynaston McShine’s ‘Information’ show in 1970, one of the earliest surveys of Conceptual art); and during its moments of high-minded glamour (Audrey Hepburn, in 1957, admiring a Picasso with Alfred H. Barr Jr., the museum’s domineering first director).”

“Born in Bonn in 1961, [Patrik] Schumacher worked with Zaha Hadid in her London office from 1988 until her death earlier this year, and rose to become her right-hand man. … Now Schumacher is in charge of the 400-strong practice, with the daunting task of continuing without the impetus that came with her fame and charisma. They have on their books projects such as the Beijing airport new terminal building, due for completion in 2018, a colossal splayed, curvaceous sea creature of a structure that will eventually handle 72 million passengers a year.”

“For all the pageantry, the retaking of Palmyra has served as a powerful reminder of how detached from reality the international campaign to save Syria’s endangered cultural heritage has been.”

“The most impressive and ambitious public building to go up in Washington in a generation — if also the owner of a truly awkward acronym — the NMAAHC draws its considerable power from a willingness to embrace the nearly bottomless complexity of both its mission and its site.”