Category: visual

The story of Austrian designer Friedensreich Regentag Dunkelbunt Hundertwasser (which means “Realm-of-Peace Rainy-Day Dark-Colored Hundred-Waters”), né Friedrich Stowasser. (includes podcast)

“After years of spending time in art museums, I’ve come to accept that I believe wildly contradictory and incompatible things about art. The usual cliché about this realization would be that by forcing us to confront contradiction, art makes us more human. But never trust anyone who says that last part: “art makes us more human.” That’s meaningless.”

“The expansion plan comes just over 60 years after the Guggenheim commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design its original space and more than a decade after it abandoned a scheme for a second, Frank Gehry-designed museum downtown.”

With the growing interest in outsider art comes the seeming contradiction of “mainstream” outsider artists, especially in the US, where monographs and high prices have created cults among collectors.

“The dominant architectural site in the city is [no longer] the Sacred Mosque, where the Kaaba, the symbolic focus of Muslims everywhere, is. It is the obnoxious Makkah Royal Clock Tower hotel … The city is now surrounded by the brutalism of rectangular steel and concrete structures – an amalgam of Disneyland and Las Vegas.”

“Using Google Earth, researchers have discovered an archeological gem in northern Kazakhstan—more than 50 previously unknown geoglyphs of different geometric shapes and sizes sprawled across the landscape. Geoglyphs are large designs created on the surface of the ground, usually made by arranging stones or sculpting the earth.”

“Engineer Pascal Cotte has spent three years using reflective light technology to analyse The Lady with an Ermine … [and] has shown the artist painted one portrait without the ermine and two with different versions of the fur.” (includes video)

“The Demuth Museum and the Lancaster Museum of Art will merge into one museum at two locations. … The museums will not change their names, nor will they unite under an umbrella title, Lampe said, because the community has strong ties to both museums. … [but] they will be a single 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with one staff and one board of trustees.”

“With more than one million visitors a year, Longwood – the former estate of the industrialist Pierre S. du Pont, who designed and built the Fountain Garden in 1931 for his own entertainment – is the most popular public garden in the country.” Currently, the fountains’ original plumbing – described as “a network of Band-Aids” – is still in use.

“The British Museum in London – complete with all of its exhibits – is to be recreated in the video game Minecraft. The project is part of the Museum of the Future scheme, which aims to expand the institution’s appeal.” And they’re crowdsourcing the (virtual) construction.