Category: visual

“The Walled City’s gardens and squares are now obscured by illegal shops and businesses, the skyline cluttered by unplanned tenements and bundles of cables. … But last month the new Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA) – in effect an independent town council – met for the first time. The body oversees the ambitious plan to restore the past glory … of the city’s oldest neighbourhood.”

“A 10-month examination and restoration of [Jackson Pollock’s] One: Number 31, 1950, by conservators at the Museum of Modern Art, have produced new insights about how the artist worked. The conservators also revealed a mysterious missing chapter in the painting’s history.”

“‘With the Internet, it’s so difficult to control your copyright or use of images that we decided we’d rather people use a very good high-resolution image of the ‘Milkmaid’ from the Rijksmuseum rather than using a very bad reproduction.”

“This for us is a germ, a seed to return to the hope that there can be even more commissions between churchmen, ecclesiastical figures and artists – quality contemporary artists.”

“The forced sale of art from a major American museum would be without precedent — and likely extraordinarily complicated and controversial.”

Graham W. J. Beal “said on Friday that he believed the museum’s collection was ‘held in the public trust’ and could not be sold by the city to help pay down its multibillion-dollar debt, and that he expected the city’s emergency manager and his office to reach the same conclusion.”

“It’s been nearly a year since Uriel Landeros walked into the Menil Collection with a can of spray paint and stenciled a bull and bullfighter, along with the word ‘conquista,’ on Pablo Picasso’s Woman in a Red Armchair. On Tuesday, the 22-year-old Landeros pleaded guilty to vandalizing the 1929 painting in exchange for two years in prison.”

The 4,926 images – including more than 1,500 in a single cave – were found at 11 different sites in the northeastern state of Burgos. Scholars had not previously thought that the area in the San Carlos Mountains had been inhabited in prehistoric times.

“Operating in the master-builder tradition, [Edmund] Bacon essentially used the force of his personality to prod a crumbling, has-been, industrial city into accepting the redevelopment he believed would reposition it for a modern future.”

“The show is an exercise in anthropology as well, an exploration of an ever-receding way of social life among successful creative people in the city, one in which the friendships built and circles configured seemed more firmly rooted in genuine affection, in affinity, in shared notions of whimsy, than in the prospect of mutual professional advantage.”