Category: visual

“The ‘new’ Barnes that contains the ‘old’ Barnes shouldn’t work, but it does. It should be inauthentic, but it’s not. … The architects have succeeded in retaining its identity and integrity without resorting to a slavishly literal reproduction. This is a beautiful building that does not compromise its contemporary convictions or upstage the treasure inside. And it isn’t alchemy. It’s architecture.”

“South African President Jacob Zuma and his African National Congress sought a court order Tuesday to have a painting depicting the president’s genitals removed from an art gallery> A Johannesburg udge said that “the full three-judge bench should hear the case because the national interest and constitutional issues are at stake.”

Christopher Hawthorne nominates downtown’s old Los Angeles Herald Examiner Building, the 1914 Mission Revival/Italianate/Moorish-style building out of which the Hearst Corporation operated the HerEx until the news paper folded in 1989.

“Perhaps proving that nothing incites suspicion among New Yorkers quite like a public display of affection, artist and furniture designer Takeshi Miyakawa was placed under arrest this weekend for setting up illuminated ‘I Love New York’ displays in a Brooklyn neighborhood.”

Loans to American museums have begun drying up (Russia has banned them altogether) because of fears that (despite existing law to the contrary) the loaned work could be seized pursuant to a lawsuit over whether the work was stolen or looted. The US House of Representatives quickly passed a law to clearly exempt museum loans from such seizure – except in Holocaust-related cases – but unanticipated objections have stalled the bill in the upper house.

“The epic seriousness, the male and female interplay, the weathered air of age: Henry Moore’s Large Two Forms evoke all these things in their first ever indoor show at the Gagosian Gallery in London. Yet they also pose a rather mundane question: how on earth did that get in here? Extremely carefully, is the short answer.”

The 6.0 quake, centered 22 miles north of Bologna, largely spared that city but wrought destruction in smaller towns and villages across north-central Emilia-Romagna. Several fresco-filled medieval churches and palazzos were severly damaged, while a 14th-century clock tower split down the middle and later collapsed.

“You can almost hear the sighs of relief coming from art galleries and auction houses up and down California: Federal Judge Jacqueline Nguyen has declared the California Resale Royalty Act unconstitutional. The highly controversial, widely misunderstood and little enforced state law that took effect in 1977 was designed to provide artists with 5% of their resale prices under certain conditions.”

“[The paintings] in the 14th century Scrovegni Chapel, are now said to be threatened by a symbol of the modern world: a futuristic 30-storey tower of flats, shops and offices” just across the Bacchiglione River. Critics “warn that digging the tower’s foundations will affect drainage across the area and could cause subsidence of the chapel walls, on which the frescoes are painted.”