Salvador Salort-Pons: “I really see the DIA as playing a role in the city like town squares play a role in European cities. You go to Madrid, Rome, Barcelona or Paris, there are these main squares where people come and gather to talk, to drink coffee to read a newspaper. I see the DIA as the city square of Detroit.”
Category: visual
Marion True Does Not Deserve Our Sympathy, Says Archaeologist
“It’s worth stating again just a few of the things True admitted doing or is alleged to have done over a nearly 20-year career as curator. … She is no innocent scapegoat, nor is she a hero for calling attention to a problem she was helping to create.”
Thousands Stand In Line To See ‘China’s Mona Lisa’
“Since an exhibition celebrating the 90th anniversary of the Palace Museum [in Beijing’s Forbidden City] opened in early September, people have been waiting for up to 10 hours to see this 17-foot-long masterpiece attributed to the painter Zhang Zeduan, an intricate ink-on-silk tableau of life in the Northern Song dynasty capital, Kaifeng. The best-known painting in the museum’s vast collection, it has been shown in public only a few times.”
Can Artists Still Shock Or Surprise In The Age Of The Selfie?
“How can performance artists possibly compete in a world where a selfie-taking Canadian can make thousands of dollars after being inadvertently kicked in the head by a Peruvian train driver and posting an 11-second video of the event on his YouTube channel?”
‘God Hates Renoir’, Say Protesters Outside Boston’s Museum Of Fine Arts
“Holding homemade signs reading ‘God Hates Renoir’ and ‘Treacle Harms Society,’ the protesters ate cheese pizza purchased by Geller, and chanted: ‘Put some fingers on those hands! Give us work by Paul Gauguin!’ and ‘Other art is worth your while! Renoir paints a steaming pile!'”
The Artists Who Paint Dinosaurs
“A dinosaur is a muse, then. To contemplate a dinosaur is to slip from the present, to travel in time, deep into the past, to see the Earth as it was tens, if not hundreds, of millions of years ago, when the continents were nearer, when the forests and oceans teemed with strange plants and creatures. In childhood, the mind is alive to the thrill of that perspective shift.”
The Earliest Photos Of Ancient Palmyra, Long Before ISIS Destroyed Much Of It
“The images were taken by French naval officer Louis Vignes during his journey through the area in 1864. Vignes was trained in photography by the renowned Charles Nègre, an early pioneer in the form. And it was Nègre who created the extraordinarily well-preserved prints — which capture Palmyra’s remarkable architecture.”
Rescuing William Butler Yeats’ Magic Tower House
“The Irish Republican Army arrived one day to announce that the bridge beside the tower was about to be blown up, and to suggest that Yeats’s wife take the children and maid upstairs for their safety.”
The Bizarre, Decaying Postmodern Suburbs Of Eastern Paris
They’re one of the settings for the final installment of The Hunger Games for a reason.
Goya’s Bleakest, And Most Modern, Paintings Came From War
“Goya’s close experience of the war brought only disillusionment. Courage is much less visible than cruelty in The Disasters of War: Zaragoza, after all, could only hold out for so long. He remorselessly shows the atrocities committed by both sides. Because this was the first guerrilla war, it released a new kind of violence.”