Category: visual

“Researchers at the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library have stumbled upon a treasure trove of … about 350 engraved plates designed by Blake in the collection.”

The Landscape House, by Amsterdam architect Janjaap Ruijssenaars, “takes the form of a continuous looping Möbius strip, rising out of the ground before folding back on itself in a seamless undulating band. Its complex geometries are not made of reinforced cast concrete, however, but layers of printed sand.”

“The review is likely to reveal that problems in the Getty’s collection go far deeper than the nearly 50 looted objects returned since 2007, according to Getty records and interviews with antiquity dealers and former museum officials.”

“Ironically, the ‘cleaning’ of the ceiling, which arguably constitutes the greatest single restoration calamity of the 20th century, occurred at a time when picture restorers had skilfully rebranded themselves as safe, scientifically validated “conservators” of all that is valuable.”

“[His] 300 drawings from the 1950s … show another side to Warhol, an artist we mostly know for his pop art screen prints, his soup cans, car crashes, Marilyns and so on. Here … we see a skilled and sensitive draughtsman producing images that are more Egon Schiele than pop art.”

Performance artist Li Liao “got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology.”

“The gist of the Met’s letters is ‘we wish they would reconsider the design and perhaps come up with a plan that doesn’t pierce the treetops on the Palisades,’ Harold Holzer, a museum spokesman, said.”

“What hovered behind the outrage, what angered the critics and the students, was how Matisse used the canvas. As much as this trial was about modernist aesthetics it was also about a question that has lurked at the edges of modern art for decades: What makes a canvas a painting? “

Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, has some choice words for art institutions in Britain at a time when his former museum is putting on a David Bowie exhibit (for the box office, he says).

“I want to believe what the Internet tells me is mostly truth, and that my contacts aren’t Catfishing me, and that even cartoonists who make a professional mistake are more like Manti Te’o the Blindly Gullible and not Manti Te’o the Possible Hoaxer.”