Category: visual

– just awful. “It has singed shopfronts, melted cars and caused great gusts of wind to sweep pedestrians off their feet. … Responsible for a catalogue of catastrophes, it is hard to imagine a building causing more damage if it tried.”

“On Sept. 19, after a five-year, relatively humble $33 million renovation, the Wadsworth is finally reopening the Morgan Memorial Building … and its European galleries, which have been mostly closed since 2009. … For the first time in 50 years all the Wadsworth’s galleries will be open at once.”

“Just as 18th-century English follies were often try-outs for new architectural styles, some of these roadside pavilions may have been experiments for bigger things. As such, they were opportunities for local sculptors, architects and builders to flex their creative muscles – and boy did they let rip.”

“As ancient sites across Syria and Iraq crumble under bombs and mortar from the region’s battles, archaeologists and technologists are racing to be able to one day reproduce them. In the coming months, they will be distributing thousands of low-cost, high-quality 3D cameras across the Middle East that will hopefully capture these ancient sites before they disappear.”

“A Twitterstorm erupted in the US last month over the findings of survey of 8,000 art galleries based in the US, UK and Germany.” Magnus Resch recommended “that most artists should be paid only 30% of sales not the traditional 50/50 split of most galleries (superstar artists aside). It probably hasn’t helped that he divides artists into some all-too-pithy categories.”

“You’ve got a muddy 18th century chest of drawers. Who you gonna call? The American Institute for Conservation Collections Emergency Response Team, also known as AIC-CERT. Okay, it’s not quite as catchy as Ghostbusters. But for workers at cultural institutions, the AIC-CERT is a disaster relief A-Team, solving problems ranging from a a burst pipe to a tsunami.”

“The public’s enthusiasm was apparent – maybe a little too apparent – on Monday when the Broad Museum began booking online reservations for its Sept. 20 opening and beyond. By midafternoon, the Web page for reservations to the new contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles carried an announcement in red type: ‘Due to overwhelming demand, our ticketing system is currently down.'”

“Approaching the 10-year mark in its handsome waterfront building, will the ICA (which was founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art) step up to the next level? Will it galvanize both artists and the public, embarrassing older, slower museums with its fleetness of foot, its largeness of vision, its willingness to provoke, surprise, and seduce? Or will it continue to strike large slabs of its potential audience as fiddly and pinched, a place of pretension, predictability, and underwhelming exhibits?”

“The result is a streamlined ratio of exhibition to ancillary space, something increasingly rare in an age of museum bloat. The Broad has 50,000 square feet of gallery space — 35,000 on the third floor and 15,000 more on the first — in a building totaling 120,000 square feet. Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum in New York has the same amount of interior exhibition space in a building covering 220,000 square feet.”

“Hundreds of St. Petersburg residents and cultural preservationists gathered on Sunday to protest the destruction of [the] bas-relief … The sculpture is offensive to Russian Orthodox believers according to a letter sent to Russian media by a Cossack who initially took credit for the removal. Another Cossack leader denounced him as a quasi-Cossack and said he would take revenge for the sculpture’s destruction.”