Category: visual

Oxford’s New Bodleian Library “is currently undergoing a £78m renovation by Wilkinson Eyre architects – due to open next year – as a home for special collections. And special collections clearly need a very special chair.”

The deputy director of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts: “This is what we all dreamed the relationship could be. … It is quite remarkable, given how often the Italian government changes.”

“Nearly every exhibition in the series said as much about the ideals, ambitions and leadership of the museum or school that organized it as it did about architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles.”

“No one wants to take responsibility for the downfall of Spreepark — the acres of fallow land at the heart of the Plänterwald Forest. The park ruins are situated in one of Berlin’s most desirable locations.”

“All the great spaces that are institutions now started out artist-run, mostly collectively. PS122, DTW (now NYLA), The Kitchen and so forth got big and less agile, more institutionalized. There’s an upside, but there’s a downside as well.”

“Rick Brettell, an internationally respected art historian, curator and educator, has been named art critic of The Dallas Morning News. Brettell, a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art, will continue as Margaret McDermott distinguished chair of art and aesthetics at the University of Texas at Dallas, a position he has held since 1998.”

It’s fraud, deception, dishonesty. But hey, a girl’s gotta eat.

“The painter’s basic challenge, the manipulation of colors and forms and metaphors on the flat plane with its almost inevitably rectangular shape, is no longer generally seen as art’s alpha and omega, as the primary place in the visual arts where meaning and mystery are believed to come together.”

“In a defamation suit filed Wednesday in New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan, she offers a glimpse at how, in the secretive world of art collecting, a host of curators and art experts can agree on the authenticity of a work without knowing a crucial piece of information: the owner’s name.”

“Any way you measure it, they plan to rob the skyline of a promised symbol and leave it with a structure that, at its best, resembles a 400-foot umbrella stand.”