“By the eighth century one of the earliest churches in Rome was considered quaint enough to be called Santa Maria Antiqua. … The church was adapted in the sixth century from first-century rooms that might have been the entryway to a palace. Layer after layer of saint murals were painted. The holy men and women in images from around A.D. 700 were believed to cure disease.”
Category: visual
Do These Cave Paintings Pre-Date Homo Sapiens?
“A series of cave paintings in Spain are thousands of years older than scientists realized, raising speculation – but no proof – that Neanderthals could have been the earliest wall artists in Europe.”
David Brooks Is Lazy In His Criticism Of Eisenhower Memorial (And He Doesn’t Understand Memorials In General)
Philip Kennicott: “No surprise, Brooks likes the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials because they invite you to look up at the great man. He argues that more recent memorials ‘evade the thorny subjects of strength and power.’ The Maya Lin-designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial is ‘about tragedy’ while the Korean memorial ‘is about vulnerability.’ But these are war memorials, not monuments to individuals. They aren’t about leadership, but rather about the most colossal failure of leadership.”
Orientalism Inverted: The Javanese Painter Who Exoticized Europe (And Himself)
“When the [19th-century] European taste for the exotic was ascendant, there was a unique case of Orientalism inverted, in the dandified figure of the Javanese painter Raden Saleh, who mastered the technique of Western artists and even mimicked their sensibility.”
Londoners, Do You Hate The Shard? Renzo Piano Has A Few Words For You
“This building is not made with the intention to be aggressive or powerful. It is not about priapismo. This building is telling a completely different story. It is celebrating a shift – in the idea that growth in a city should not happen by building more and more on the periphery. … I’m not an advocate of tall buildings, but I am an advocate of intensifying the city from the inside.”
EU Targets Money Laundering With New Regulations For Art Galleries
“Lowering the threshold will not make life more difficult for money launderers. It will, however, make business more difficult for the art trade. It is the smaller dealers in antiques and lower-end fine art who accept cash: and they’re the ones suffering most in this economic climate.”
Turkey Refuses Antiquities Loans As It Demands Repatriation Of Its Art
“European museums that are being targeted include the Louvre, Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In America, claims are being lodged against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Cleveland Museum of Art and Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.”
Bringing MoMA’s Treasures To The World’s Most Isolated Big City
“Picasso to Warhol: 14 Modern Masters” is the first of half a dozen six-month exhibitions – all featuring pieces from the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art – at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth. Among the other “modern masters” in the show: Matisse, Miró, Mondrian, Pollock, Calder and Bourgeois.
Are Memorials About Power And Authority?
Why can’t today’s memorial designers think straight about just authority? Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.”
Warning: Greek Antiquities Imperiled By Budget Cuts
“Effects of the cultural cuts are already being felt by the public, as museum galleries and sometimes whole museums suffer from sporadic closings. But Greek and international archaeologists and curators warn that the real consequences of the cuts will not become fully apparent for years and will be far more dire for ancient artifacts and historical scholarship.”