Category: visual

“Patrum sounds lovely and philanthropic, but it is pandering to the culture of restoration that does as much harm as good. Italy is full of artistic marvels. They need careful protection and obviously, that includes restoring where restoring is essential. But it is a delicate balance. The problem with restoration is that it excites people – it becomes a story,”

“Hurtado has made pictures of a dolphin, a dog, a deer and a sunset — but with contemporary artistic flourishes. That means bold, geometric swaths of primary colors, abstracted elements and quirky additions, such as a wrestling type mask on a young girl. Hurtado then takes this new work and slips it into the thrift-store frame.”

“Henry Varnum Poor, who died in 1970, was once among the country’s best-known painters and potters, and his work is owned by museums across the country, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cooper Hewitt and the Art Institute of Chicago. He built the main part of Crow House in 1920 and 1921, using chestnut tree trunks as beams and hauling rocks from a nearby sandstone quarry in a Ford Model T.”

“There was a Rodin
at another museum.
So what was its name?”

“Much of the credit should go to a quietly heroic generation of architects. These have grown up in the era following the backlash against their profession, when they could take nothing for granted, when they had to prove again and again that their ideas were not the fantasies of arrogant dreamers, but honest efforts to improve the quality of the lives of future residents. They sometimes find themselves among the worst-paid and hardest-working around the tables of consultants who nowadays get buildings built, and the most committed to the social benefits of the final product.”

The thieves are less than brilliant – no Thomas Crown Affair here – and so, often, are those tasked to find them.

Artist Anish Kapoor to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel: “Creativity in all walks of life is hard won. It is incorrect to accept that we should allow for it to be undermined or stolen and therefore give it little or no value. Chicago will lose from this thievery. We cannot let this happen.”

“The answer is simple: The Japanese are different from you and me. They don’t confuse books with their covers. … The motto guiding Japan’s way of being might be: New is the new old. For proof, you need only look at three recent high-profile and much-debated demolition jobs in Tokyo.”

“Poland’s Solina dam, completed in 1969 and the tallest dam in Poland, has been collecting dirt and grime on its walls for decades. But when it came time for the 269-foot dam to get a good powerwash, the energy company Polska Grupa Energetyczna had an idea.”

“The sculpture in the town of Karamay and the outrage about it raises fascinating questions. Why would a city in China think it could just knock up a copy of a living artist’s work without permission? Is this a malign act, or a magnificently naive one? Do people in the west make too much of the rights of the individual author?”