Category: visual

“The government’s announcement that it would sell the collection through the auction house Christie’s in London set off intense discussion of what kind of assets the state should be allowed to sell, and whether the nation’s cultural heritage is off limits.”

Tourists are grumbling, schoolteachers are lamenting, and members are choosing not to renew until construction is finished in 2016. The insane San Francisco real estate market means there’s no affordable temporary museum space in the city, so the art in in storage. What to do? Innovate, improvise, and partner.

“In the first phase, four stations have been identified for the project, with each to be transformed according to one particular theme: Islamic art and Arabic calligraphy, inventions, contemporary art and [multimedia] visual art.”

The legislation put forth by 12 councilmembers aims to put in place “a permitting process providing for clear guidelines in distinguishing commercial speech from public art, describing required public input, and reviewing the effect on traffic safety,” because displays of public art “can become excessive.”

“Hudson Yards is the largest private development project in U.S. history, and it’s being built without footings or foundations.”

Jerry Saltz: “The greatest collection of modernism on Earth has been relegated to rotating storage. If the wrecking ball swings in May, our beautiful garden of modernism will become another Penn Station.”

Architecture’s most prestigious honor goes to a 56-year-old Japanese designer “known for building refugee shelters at almost every cataclysmic natural disaster for the past 20 years.”

Michael Kimmelman: “You can listen to students at architecture schools, many of them anxious to make an impact beyond the bubble of fading glamour in which stardom derives from designing costly art museum expansions and megaprojects for clients in Qatar and Dubai, built on the backs of indentured labor.”

“An initial theory that the fresco had been taken away for conservation was quickly disproved. Another wall painting fragment, from the House of the Orchard, was previously stolen from an on-site laboratory during restoration, the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports.”

“Redditor Shystone has laid old paintings over Google Street View photographs to create a series of perspective-bending composite images of old and new London. Modern sculptures dominate a plaza that was once wide open; neon signs reside on the same block as gas-lit streetlights; and a bridge covers over a river that was once filled with sailboats.”