Category: visual

“The court calls them ‘The Intervenors,’ which sounds as if it could be the name of a performance art collective…. The scrappy group of students, staff, faculty and concerned observers … see themselves as David fighting Goliath – which makes their recent legal intervention the proverbial sling to the forehead.”

Prime Minister Antonis Samaras, visiting the site at Amphiopolis, “said he was confident it would yield an ‘exceptionally important find’ from the early Hellenistic period. The tomb dates to between 325 and 300 BC, which coincides with the time when Alexander the Great died.” (in English)

This past spring, the Montreal-based collective En Masse, as part of a University invited residency program, worked with local youth to create a large piece on the side wall of an empty muffler shop on the South Side. Then, thanks to some very bad luck, the community turned against the piece – and so the arguments began.

The standard poster demonstrating the Heimlich that you see in every New York City restaurant is clear, mostly grayscale, almost demure – and all too easy to ignore entirely. So several eateries have commissioned designers to create new versions: cocktail-lounge romance, ’50s nautical theme, ballroom dancing manual, and, yes, Bea Arthur and a unicorn. But there’s a problem, and it’s not just killjoy Health Department inspectors. (includes audio podcast and sample posters)

The fiberglass work by British artists Jake and Dinos Chapman, titled Piggyback, depicts two nude girls, one with a penis sticking out of her mouth.

A bracket-style competition by public vote to choose the Smithsonian Institution’s “most iconic” object has led to a barrage of competitive tweeting and Photoshopping, as a Pullman train car races against the original “Star-Spangled Banner” flag, and a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton battles the National Zoo’s young panda (“Bao Bao may be small, but at least she’s not extinct.”) and the space shuttle Discovery (“What is black and white AND has been to space? Not Bao Bao.”).

Huecheros is “the [Guatemalan] slang term for antiquity looters, derived from the Maya word for armadillo. On a building overlooking an ancient plaza, the looters scrawl a message, brazen and taunting: “We, the huecheros, stuck it to this place.” Here’s the who, what, where, and how.

The canvases, which include Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, have technically been on loan from the royal family’s collection ever since the Spanish Civil War. But now the National Heritage Office is building a new museum to house the Royal Collections, due to open in 2016.

Art historian and Painter Imants Lancmanis first came to Rundale Palace, a grand 54-room pile completed in 1740 for the Duke of Courland, in 1964, while he was an art student in Riga – and he spent the next half-century renovating it. (During the Soviet years, of course, work went very slowly.)

“This is an account about how two New York museums seized this dream — and how one of them clings to it still, while the other has found that the Internet’s true value isn’t in being everywhere but in enhancing the here.”