Category: visual

“For many in Russia, Marina Loshak’s appointment to replace Irina Antonova, who had headed the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts for more than half a century, is more than a mere reshuffle. It means that modernization has spread to museums – one of the most conservative spheres of public life.”

“The colors of art change not just with trends, but availability as well. For reasons of being incredibly poisonous, expensive, or just involving way too many snails, here are five pigments that have disappeared from art.”

The first article about art colors no longer in use got such a good response that they did a second one. Most of these pigments fell out of use because they were made of substances like arsenic, lead and uranium.

“It continues to struggle with an estimated $22 million in damage from Superstorm Sandy. The Museum of the City of New York said last month it could no longer operate the waterfront museum in lower Manhattan.”

“Irina Antonova’s departure, announced on Monday at a hurriedly convened news conference by the culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, with Ms. Antonova at his side, was interpreted by many as punishment for her role in dragging Mr. Putin into her feud with the Hermitage.”

“Some local artists who support the ordinance believe that street art will continue to flourish whether the City Council lifts the current ban.”

“Murano, an island near the city centre, has been home to glass factories for 700 years. But a shift in taste from elaborate, heavy glass to inexpensive, contemporary designs that go in the dishwasher has hurt local artisans. More than a third have shut up shop in the past decade. At the bottom end of the market Chinese glass now does the job more cheaply.”

“In covering their tracks, the looters effectively wiped out the sort of information — the size of the tomb, the number of rooms, how the various urns and other artifacts were arranged — that scholars scour for information to reconstruct ancient civilizations.”

“People have been painting since the stone age, and the conscious, written history of painting goes back to ancient Greece. When a painter faces a blank canvas, that weight of tradition is daunting – you are doing the same thing Caravaggio and Rembrandt did. What can you add that is truly new?”

Lee Lawrence walks readers through the elaborate, painstaking, profound, and ultimately futile (because the work is swept away in the end) process of producing intricate religious imagery from tiny grains of colored marble.