Category: visual

Museums Director Antonio Paolucci said in an article in the Vatican newspaper on Wednesday that sometimes as many as 20,000 people a day visit the chapel. But, he said, for the time being “the adoption of a maximum number (of visitors) will not be necessary.”

“Despite the efforts of its protectors, looters managed to make off with 50 of the [Egyptian Museum’s] treasures … Of the stolen pieces, 29 have since been recovered. … At the same time, however, reports have started to come in of sophisticated and systematic looting occurring across major Egyptian archaeological sites.”

Inside the chapel of San Pedro Apóstol at Andahuaylillas, about 40 km from Cuzco and built between 1570 and 1606, every surface is either covered in gold or painted with fantastical designs and imagery – and those surfaces are glowing once again following a four-year restoration. (The chapel also houses the two oldest surviving organs in the Western Hemisphere, both recently refurbished as well.)

“The first thing you noticed walking through the streets lined with art galleries between 10th and 11th Avenues in Chelsea, on Wednesday, was the constant, undulating roar of generators, and the hoses, in clumps of three or four, snaking out of just about every gallery, from which cold water that had come flooding in from the Hudson River now gushed into the street.”

Chris Drury’s Carbon Sink: What Goes Around Comes Around, installed at the University of Wyoming in late 2011, “consisted of a 36-foot-wide circle of logs from beetle-killed trees, arranged in a whirlpool pattern around a pile of coal. … In May 2012, however, just after most students left campus, Carbon Sink quietly disappeared.”

The thieves “got two paintings by Monet, a Picasso, a Matisse, a Gauguin, a Lucien Freud, and one painting by Meyer de Haan.” [emphasis added] Who? Why?? Morgan Meis susses out some clues.

“Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, has criticised the contemporary works that temporarily occupy the empty plinth in front of the gallery in Trafalgar Square as ‘antagonistic to the architectural character of the square’, turning the plinth into ‘a stage, which can be used ironically, farcically [and] inappropriately’.”

“Around $630 million of state artworks held by the National Gallery of Victoria are languishing in overcrowded vaults and are not stored to an acceptable industry standard.”

“Cleaners and maintenance workers at London’s British Museum went on strike Monday against plans to outsource their work.”

If visitors to the city’s Museumplein “look up they will then see a red line in the sky and if they follow that down narrow streets, across crowded junctions, over bridges, under a grim 1960s office block, and through pretty squares – they will arrive at the Van Gogh museum’s new home for the next six months, the Amsterdam branch of the Hermitage.”