Category: visual

“Located just four miles south of Mosul,” Dair Mar Elia (St. Elijah’s Monastery) “was built in the 6th century by Assyrian Catholic monks … [Satellite] imagery analyst Stephen Wood described the stone walls as ‘literally pulverized … into this field of gray-white dust.'”

“The camera is an instrument of transformation. It can make what it sees more beautiful, more gruesome, milder, darker, all the while insisting on the plain reality of its depiction. This is what Brecht meant in 1931 when he wrote, ‘The camera is just as capable of lying as the typewriter’.”

“From the beginning, he rebelled against the austerity of modernism, its pitiless Euclidean demands and its contempt for decoration. Even the chain-link fencing, in this view, was a gesture at classical embellishment, his version of the blind niches and capitals and other flourishes that make classical buildings interesting to look at, though they serve no structural purpose.”

“This is better than MoMA,” said Ai about the Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris, site of his latest installation. He found “that working in a department store had been liberating. It allowed him to go beyond the white cube of most galleries and use the atrium and window displays in an interesting way, he said, and he liked that passers-by could see his work.”

“The sculpture by internationally recognized artist Jaume Plensa was taken down in November and altered after a New Jersey blogger accused the artist of embedding anti-Semitic slurs within what are supposed to be a random spill of steel letters.”

Jed Perl: “We are at a moment in the arts when historical reckonings, involving as they do considerations of precedent, genealogy, and chronology, can too easily be dismissed as reactionary gestures, canonical considerations to be tossed aside. There is all the more reason to press for a reconsideration of the tradition that begins with Rodin.”

The restoration, of St. John the Baptist, “is scheduled to begin later this month despite past criticism that earlier makeovers of two other paintings by Leonardo overly brightened them.”

“What does it mean for women to be brought late to the table? In other words, even if some of the women here were working alongside the men of their generation, what does it mean if they are considered more seriously only in retrospect, rather than at the same time as the men?”

“Despite France’s reputation as a hotbed of sexual liberation, art and sex have mixed badly in recent years.”

“After a two-year, nearly $2 million investigation, a German government task force set up to determine ownership of an art collection amassed by a Nazi-era dealer announced Thursday that it had identified the rightful owners of just five of the works whose provenance was in doubt.”