Category: visual

“A metal casting of a 504-year-old Leonardo da Vinci beeswax sculpture was unveiled to the world in a ceremony on Monday in Los Angeles. Horse and Rider is the only known three-dimensional piece of art created by Leonardo to still exist.”

“A divide is opening up – generationally, economically and philosophically. The starchitects … are still here, but the appetite for celebrations of individual genius, and isolated, beautifully crafted buildings, seems to be dissipating. To co-opt the language of the Occupy movement, the big names are starting to look like architecture’s 1%.”

“This relatively relaxed form of art viewing often bears out something a friend told me Picasso once said: that any painting contains something worth looking at. From my experience, this may be a somewhat optimistic assessment, but ferreting out the worthy bits in anonymous paintings is great and often instructive fun.”

The prize, offered by the Hammer Museum and decided by a public vote, riled artists who object on several grounds…

“In recent days, visitors to the city have been surprised to see pigeons sporting plumages that would do credit to a tropical parrot: green and yellow pigeons; pigeons whose feathers radiate electric blue or strident vermillion; even pigeons that seem to be robed in imperial purple. … [The] coloured birds were the work of a Swiss artist, Julian Charrière, and a German photographer, Julius von Bismark.” Some animal rights activists, however, are not charmed.

Kazunori Asada, a Japanese medical scientist and poet, believes that “Vincent van Gogh’s acidic sense of color and preference for bright, clashing hues” were due to a midrange spectrum deficiency – “that van Gogh’s eyes had a moderate lack of receptors for the color red.”

“Now, two decades after it was denounced by Jesse Helms in Congress and almost sent Dennis Barrie to jail, the X Portfolio is finally coming out.”

“There is a tremendous amount of energy around the arts in Saudi, but relatively few institutions and Alaan Artspace is Riyadh’s first curated contemporary art platform.”

“[The] divisive nature of Goff’s work, coupled with the location of many of his completed design projects – most in rural or residential areas in the Midwest – has limited his work from receiving the recognition it deserves,” despite the admiration he received from no less than Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Professional restorers do not, of course, make the kind of crass and catastrophic blunders that Cecilia Gimenez made. But if their interventions do not actually destroy far more important works of art than Martinez’s fresco, there is a growing consensus that they do not always improve them – and on occasion, they may seriously damage them.”