Category: visual

With 15 galleries stretching around the world and a host of former employees also making their marks, his influence is large.

“We have received many offers of donations of Lego in the past days. People have shown their generosity, creative spirit and enthusiasm to become engaged in this project, and we are pleased to be the first international collection point.

“There was discussion about the president and first lady liking more abstract art,” said William Allman, the longtime curator of the White House art collection, who has arranged loans of the more modern paintings from museums. “Our collection doesn’t really have any of that.”

“[Peggy] Fogelman, who currently serves as the director of collections at New York’s Morgan Library & Museum, has broad experience on both the curatorial and educational sides of museums – knowledge that could well position her to expand the Gardner’s audience and further its multidisciplinary programming.”

“The creative ferment is happening even as unrest in the region and domestic political instability have ground the economy and tourism to a near halt and threaten to embroil Lebanon in new conflicts. Beirut is also a city where luxury towers are redrawing the skyline while the arrival in recent years of an estimated 1.5 million refugees from neighboring Syria has strained the infrastructure of a country of 4 million. A crisis over garbage collection recently plagued the city, but seems to have subsided.”

Meant in part as a counterpoint to New York’s wildly popular High Line, and conceived by architect and “urban archaeologist” James Ramsey, the Lowline (if it really does get built) will be a landscaped public space reclaimed out of a derelict three-block-long underground trolley terminal on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.

“Among the tools used will be infrared thermography to detect temperature variations on the monuments’ exteriors, which could reveal previously unseen cavities, chambers or corridors close to the surface. With the help of drones, the team will use photogrammetry and laser scanning to make accurate 3D models of the pyramids, other monuments nearby and their general surroundings.”

“The tablets were described on their FedEx shipping label as samples of “hand-crafted clay tiles.” This description may have been technically accurate, but the monetary value assigned to them—around $300, we’re told—vastly underestimates their true worth, and, just as important, obscures their identification as the cultural heritage of Iraq.”

“The warrior’s grave belongs to a time and place that give it special significance. He was buried around 1500 B.C., next to the site on Pylos on which, many years later, arose the palace of Nestor, a large administrative center that was destroyed in 1180 B.C., about the same time as Homer’s Troy. The palace was part of the Mycenaean civilization; from its ashes, classical Greek culture arose several centuries later.”

Sotheby’s said “the buyer was considering a long-term loan to a British art institution, or a permanent loan to Penrhyn Castle in north Wales, where the portrait had been on display from 1949 to 2013.”