Category: visual

An exhibition in Shenzhen – China’s Silicon Valley and its counterfeit capital – considers the fading of the distinction between “real” and “knockoff” as well as the genuine benefits that the latter can provide.

“The results suggest there are simple ways to manipulate a classroom environment to boost students’ innovation—even in inner-city schools, where, as far as the kids are concerned, the natural world is a distant rumor.”

“Design student Ariana Cuvin won the contest and the $3,500 prize, but her technicolor take on the maple leaf has its share of detractors, including Stuart Ash, who designed the maple leaf seen on Canada’s flag. Maybe because it looks like something made for the Winter Olympics?”

“The high-powered art dealer Larry Gagosian says he bought it. The royal family of Qatar says it bought the sculpture, too. And now they are facing off in court over who owns Picasso’s important plaster bust of his muse (and mistress) Marie-Thérèse Walter, a star of the Museum of Modern Art’s popular ‘Picasso Sculpture’ show.”

“The clouds in many 19th-century European paintings look drastically different than those in the 18th century. There are layers to their texture, with whisps of cirrus clouds flying over billowing cumulus, and stratus hovering low. Clouds weren’t classified by type until 1802, and their subsequent study influenced artists from John Constable to J. M. W. Turner.”

“Despite a near-universal outcry over the Islamic State’s actions, few countries have shown interest in imposing new restrictions to curb the booming trade in antiquities, estimated to be worth billions of dollars a year.”

“Undercover police officers confiscated the canvas from a pair of textile businessmen attempting to sell the work for 14 million lira ($4.6 million). … While Turkish authorities have not officially identified the painting, art experts from the Museum of Painting and Sculpture in Istanbul are confident that the canvas is a long-lost van Dyck masterpiece.”

“The paintings Miró made in Majorca are those of an artist ‘who was not afraid of death or failure, but who was afraid of repeating himself again and again,’ Mr. Punyet Miró said on a recent visit to the studio. ‘The older he gets, the more expressive he gets, the more violent he gets.'”

“In an age of growing income inequality, the excesses of today’s art market are, for some, beginning to grate. In October, Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern in London, wrote in The Art Newspaper that there was a conflict between ‘those who treat art as a private good — from which to profit’ and those who participate in art as a ‘collective process and common endeavor, based on inclusion and access.'”

“Apologies to Tadao Ando, Denys Lasdun, Robert Maillart, Oscar Niemeyer, Zaha Hadid, Rachel Whiteread, Pier Luigi Nervi, Marcel Breuer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Sverre Fehn, all of them magicians with concrete who deserve a place in a top 10. But the last slot goes to … “