Category: visual

“Data centers are boring places. Even Google’s massive facilities — with all the colorful walls and pipes inside — can get a little stale and repetitive. So to liven up the vibe a little bit, the company has invited artists to create murals at several of its data centers.”

“Levin had called Klein’s blue paint ‘cheap poster-paint.’ Musgrave corrected him in a letter to the editor, pointing out that Klein ‘prepares and grinds his own paint, an exacting process which gives it its own especial depth, brilliance and beauty.’ This was Klein’s ultramarine blue, in which the radiance and intensity of the original dry pigment was not compromised or dulled by the medium binding it to the support.”

A spiraling 1955 house that was considered one of the icons of 20th-century organic modernism has been destroyed. And not just demolished but ripped out of the ground, as Bruce Goff’s Bavinger House in Norman, Oklahoma, had been built right into the state’s red earth.

Japan sets up an actual art gallery in one of its shikansen bullet trains, while France’s SNCF has partnered with the Musée d’Orsay and 3M to project images of Impressionist landscapes on the ceilings of select train cars.

“For decades, [Piero’s Madonna del Parto] has been entangled in the type of distinctly Italian bureaucratic standoff that can bend time as well as logic. The contested issue is how and where the fresco should be displayed. The Roman Catholic Church is involved. So is the Ministry of Culture. There has been litigation. There have been government committees. There have been TV specials.”

Yes, that’s exactly what the artist (and his Medici patron) set out to do circa 1490. While he never completed the project (he evidently felt as unequal to the task of depicting Paradise as Dante did), quite a number of his illustrations have survived.

“According to the AP, a court ruled yesterday that Igarashi, who goes by “Rokudenashiko” (“good-for-nothing girl”), is guilty of obscenity for sharing the data but not for exhibiting her physical objects since they qualify as art under Japanese law.”

“As the most ardent promoter of Spain’s pavilion [for the Paris World’s fair], [Juan] Larrea … realized that the obliteration of Guernica would provide the artist with the very subject he had been seeking. When Picasso claimed to have no idea what a bombed town looked like, Larrea replied, ‘like a bull in a china shop, run amok.'”

“This year’s artists include one who made an 18ft sculpture of a man’s bare buttocks, another obsessed by corrugated shop window shutters, another whose sculptures are described as ‘slippery and elusive’ and a fourth who allowed thrilled visitors to ride around the gallery on a choo-choo train.”