Category: visual

“The embattled Egyptian Museum says it has begun to log every act of conservation it makes, as it attempts to restore its reputation following the furore over Tutankhamun’s botched beard.”

“Four museums in Miami are currently searching for new directors. In a city that has transformed itself into one of the top destinations for contemporary art in the US over the past decade and boasts perhaps ten significant art institutions, nearly half are now leaderless.”

Christopher Knight, observing that several of the statues destroyed were obviously modern copies: “Earlier snuff videos … show the beheading of soldiers, journalists and humanitarian aid workers. The new video purports to show nothing less than the beheading of an entire civilization. The question is: Does it really? Or is the video, instead, a grotesque perversion of performance art, cynically designed to inflate the image of Islamic State power?”

“In response to the destruction of antiquities in Mosul last week by Islamic State militants, the Iraqi government reopened the National Museum of Iraq in Baghdad this weekend, with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi speaking out against the terrorist group at the ribbon cutting.”

“I’m living next to the Earth Room, one of Dia’s sites. Usually artists stay there. I wake up and see the Earth Room, and say good night to it, too. It’s a project that Walter De Maria built in 1977 and it’s exactly as it sounds, a space on the first floor of a building in SoHo, which is filled with earth. It has a very strong presence, and it’s there, next to you.”

“There was an intense flowering of experimental and futuristic architecture in the 1960s and 70s, which the young African countries used to express their national identities. … But we simply don’t know about it.”

“Following the removal of mosaics by Eduardo Paolozzi from a London tube station earlier this month to a storage facility in Norfolk, the Twentieth Century Society conservation group has called for a ‘Domesday Book’ survey of post-war public art.”

“Even without the argument for higher beauty in a new medium, there’s plenty of other incentive for game developers to bring high-design into their games. The best incentive of all, really: sales.”

“The audience has grown, she says, and ‘it’s definitely more obsessive. They come straight to the section and know what they’re purchasing. It’s a herd thing as well: you see certain bloggers who are followed, you go on to YouTube and project by word of mouth.'”

“The Vienna fire service has concerns about the wooden structure, however, and is working with the architects to test their plans.”