Category: visual

“An archaeologist says he has found the oldest piece of rock art in Australia and one of the oldest in the world: an Aboriginal work created 28,000 years ago in an outback cave.”

“The Venezuelan government is demanding the return from Germany of a red sandstone rock that is the central attraction of a Berlin sculpture park, claiming it has sacred properties and was stolen from a group of indigenous people. The 35-tonne boulder was procured from the Canaima National Park in south-eastern Venezuela by the German artist Wolfgang von Schwarzenfeld in 1997.”

“At Switzerland’s Art Basel, the leading international contemporary and modern art fair, more than 300 galleries from 36 countries are showing around 2,500 artists until Sunday. The works on display range from abstract and figurative paintings to video and performance art. U.S. galleries have the largest presence at the fair, with 73 galleries in attendance.”

“At twilight on Monday, something new will light up a Times Square billboard. An original work of art, 23 stories high, will replace a bright yellow ad for Sprint. The artist whose work now gets a canvas Rembrandt could never have imagined is a substitute teacher from Allentown, Pa., who has made art for over 30 years but never had the backing of a major museum or gallery. Her creation will loom over Times Square because she won an online contest in which users of a Web site gave her more votes than 35,000 competitors.”

New York Hospital: “Far up, almost invisible from the street, are touches of brilliance, where the peaks of the nine-foot-high Gothic arches are formed by panels of very thin brick set at cross angles, with the staff of Asclepius worked into the design. If you can get up close, the varying patterns are hypnotic, like the little rilles and ridges in the shallow water of a white-sand beach.”

“We are not dealing here with imagined reconstructions, but with the past’s palpable presence. And most of these ancient cities and monuments were abandoned some six centuries before the Spaniards plundered the region. After 80 years of archaeological research, their meanings are still unclear, though much has been written about Zapotec social hierarchies, gladiatorial-style games and stone carvings.”

Artists – especially those who avoided art school – say they must be engaged with issues, including the Arab Spring and economic inequality. Why?

The L.A. mural’s original artist will use 120 digital frames to resize and repaint the mural smaller, and on a different side of the building, as developers destroy the old one.

Museums across the country “argued that they would be forced to hire lawyers to investigate their collections for works containing borrowed images, and given the ubiquity of such images in 20th-century art, the cost to the museums would be unsustainable. The more likely, though no less troubling, alternative is for museums to censor what they exhibit.”

Sure, the note on “tatty wrapping paper” claimed the sketches, which had been placed in a cupboard for decades, were by Constable, but who could believe that? (Experts.)