Category: visual

“Some museums just aren’t meant to be. For reasons of being too complicated, expensive, or just too out there to exist, many architects’ plans for museums have been unrealized.”

“A year after Ed Ruscha joined three other prominent Los Angeles artists in resigning from the Museum of Contemporary Art’s board of trustees, he has signed on to the board of another major California arts institution – the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.”

“The V&A at Dundee, an affiliate of the London museum in eastern Scotland, secured planning permission this week and building work is due to start next summer. … With costs estimated at £45m, it is the most expensive gallery project ever undertaken in Scotland.”

“Elite buyers paid up to $17 million to own just one of these canvases, said to have been created by the hands of artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline and Robert Motherwell. But federal prosecutors say that most, if not all, of the 63 ballyhooed works – which fetched more than $80 million in sales – were painted in a home and garage in Queens.”

“A badger in Germany deserves a reward for making a significant archaeological discovery: the medieval tombs of two Slavic lords buried with an array of intriguing artefacts.”

“The anonymous gas station operator whose shop walls were graced with a Banksy mural, which he subsequently cut out and put up for auction, has decided to come forward. Eytan Rosenberg, 44, owned the garage on the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue in Los Angeles with his family.”

“The premise is simple and elegant: Use the Internet to a) spread the word to a diverse, international art audience about what could be lost if any sale goes forward; b) suggest that readers expand the process by posting their own links and images to social media sites such as Twitter and Instagram; and c) generate support for the Detroit Institute of Arts by asking readers to click through and buy a museum membership (an individual membership starts at $65).”

“Constructed with ersatz boulders, crisscrossed by trellises and walkways and dotted with the occasional shrub, the two-story aerie resembles the idealized mountains depicted in classical Chinese paintings — except the requisite lonely monk of yore has been replaced by a flashy karaoke parlor.”

“Officials in the town of Borja in northeast Spain say it has drawn more than 40,000 visitors and raised more than 50,000 Euros for charity.”

“It must compete with all the other ads, with their increasingly sophisticated moving images and other attention-grabbing gimmicks. The art does not stand a chance. On billboards and bus stops, it becomes just another thing for people to ignore.”