Category: visual

“After dozens of meetings and a few orphaned ideas, the Getty has settled on a theme for a 2017 sequel to the 2011-12 museum exhibition extravaganza known as Pacific Standard Time. It will be ‘Los Angeles and Latin America,’ or ‘L.A./L.A.’ for short.”

Cash remains tight at the museum, which still hasn’t recovered from the loss of a third of its endowment’s value in the 2008 crash. Charles Venable is focused on increasing attendance with attractions from an upcoming Matisse show to an art-of-the-automobile exhibition that has some observers fuming.

“Four hundred fragments of bricks from Babylon’s Ishtar Gate and Processional Way have been stolen. The local Iraqi press reported the loss of 33 pieces last October, but in February the minister of tourism and antiquities, Liwa Sumaism, gave the much higher figure.”

“The asking price is $950,000, plus relocation costs. And they’ve found a prospective buyer: an Italian architect wants to bring it to Fiesole, a hilltop town near Florence, where Frank Lloyd Wright once lived.”

In their design for the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien “hold a variety of tensions at bay. The tower’s layered planes appear ready to peel apart. The tower itself erupts from a broad, plain-spoken two-story base with a sawtooth clerestory roof.”

“The period rooms in art museums have the mustiest, dustiest of reputations. They are often seen as the cultural equivalent of grandma’s overstuffed couch that smelled like a fleet of cats.” (They say that like it’s a bad thing.) “But some museums have discovered at least one secret ingredient to make their potentially snooze-inducing rooms more palatable to the public: a chef of sorts.”

“In the early 1960s, as Lawrence Herbert drove to work in a blue Cadillac with cherry red seats, he mulled over a problem: How to create a ‘universal language’ of color. … Each company defined colors differently, and when you ordered ‘wheat’ or ‘taupe’ or ‘cream,’ you couldn’t predict what you’d get.”

“While most of the suits have argued that the paintings Ms. Rosales brought to market were fakes, Mr. Mirvish says his are Modernist masterpieces and that he lost out on millions of dollars in profits when Knoedler failed to sell them.”

“The act of preserving or reviving Tibetan art is arguably more important than at any time since China’s devastating Cultural Revolution” – but it’s not without controversy.