Category: visual

“[A panorama] wasn’t meant to be viewed all at once. As a sort of pre-cinema film strip, it would be slowly turned for an audience as it immersed itself in the nautical narrative. Despite the huge popularity of such moving panoramas in the 19th century, very few survive. One of these rare examples is having a special viewing this month.”

“The ban on weird architecture is linked to the government’s attempts to reinforce China’s leadership and cultural supremacy by restricting foreign influences.”

“Until local architect Carlos Quevedo got his hands on this protected national monument, in Villamartín, it was just another ruined Andalusian fortress – indistinguishable from those topping practically every hill in the region. Now it has been mutilated into a startling Frankenstein bunker, it has become an international celebrity.”

“Three ancient Mesopotamian sculptures, thought to have been excavated illegally in Syria or Iraq, have been found in a Slovenian refugee camp on the border with Croatia, police said on Wednesday.”

“Successive generations of artists, designers and taste-makers have found that they too could repurpose Botticelli for their own ends without – and this is important and hard to explain – ever making him look trivial or banal.”

“Mikhail Piotrovsky, the director of the State Hermitage Museum [in St. Petersburg], says that … his museum can help to rebuild the ancient city. … The Hermitage is working with its peers – informally, for now – to gather photographs, engravings and other archival documents that capture the ancient city from every possible angle.”

“In today’s exploding art market, amid diminishing corporate donations and mounting exhibition costs, nonprofit museums have been leaning more heavily on commercial galleries for larger amounts of money — anywhere from $5,000 to $200,000 each time — to help pay for shows featuring work by artists the galleries represent.”

Under the headline “Art Goes to Hell,” the Times gives us an illustrated guide to the wonderfully bizarre creatures that populate (if that’s the word) Bosch’s paintings.

Peter Schjeldahl: “Most critical responses so far to ‘Unfinished’ … seethe with unstated resentments. The writers quibble with a theme that tracks changing notions of ‘finish’ through almost seven centuries of Western art … They find it a gauzy sort of curatorial idea – which it is, but with one overriding, tremendous virtue: calling attention to visual facts.”