Category: visual

Christopher Hawthorne: “Forget Monticello or the Chrysler building: There may be no piece of architecture more quintessentially American than the Astrodome. Widely copied after it opened in 1965, it perfectly embodies postwar U.S. culture in its brash combination of Space Age glamour, broad-shouldered scale and total climate control.”

Peter Schjeldahl: “Rockwell’s populous American mythos is ever more to be valued as the shared beliefs that used to gird it devolve into hellish divisions. His lodestar was Charles Dickens, naturalized to New England towns and to suburbs anywhere. And he drew and painted angelically, with subtle technical ingenuity, involving layered colors, that is still underappreciated.”

“Priceless and wholly unknown works by Henri Matisse, Otto Dix and a host of other major 20th-century artists formed part of a collection of some 1,400 works of art confiscated or sold under the Nazis and discovered last year when customs officials investigated an elderly man for tax evasion, officials and an art historian said Tuesday.”

“Art is the last unfinished business of World War Two. Though the Allies uncovered large numbers of stolen paintings in 1945 in the Alt Aussee salt mines near Salzburg, and in a castle south of Munich, an unknown number have been lost forever. Russia holds more than 120,000 wartime art objects in three museums round Moscow.”

“Somehow the language used for describing and discussing art has a reputation for unusual opacity, even sadism.”

“Cornell University is preparing to forfeit to Iraq a vast collection of ancient cuneiform tablets in what is expected to be one of the largest returns of antiquities by an American university.”

“Wiggly and squiggly, jagged and jutting, the iconic architectural ‘marvels’ of today make all the original midcentury stuff look like a bunch of country cottages.”

Did the gallery do everything possible to make sure it wasn’t selling forgeries? Doesn’t look like it, nope. The gallery was warned about a known seller of forged art – and then bought a “de Kooning” from him anyway.

“Nairn defended the particularities of place, people’s right to inhabit their localities as they wish, and the beauty and character in the spaces around us. He raged against the destructive collusion of corporations and government.”

“Sometimes, they give us works that great artists simply didn’t get around to making. If a fake is good enough to fool experts, then it’s good enough to give the rest of us pleasure, even insight.”