Category: visual

“Though the cover may make some readers squeamish, its imagery has a precedent deep in art history, where the image of a woman breast-feeding — and even breast-feeding someone older than a child — is less controversial.”

“Sherman’s photographs evoke an idea of art as a mediated illusion, a grotesque and haunting chimera composed of different parts and pieces, of high-art and popular culture, of fantasies and uncertainties that are embedded and embodied in an array of visual cues that we encounter each day. These ideas have become our language about art and images since the late 1980s.”

Artist Mira Schor: “The rectangle is a dynamic visual space, it is a dynamic compositional space, it is architectural, you have room to put something in and then something else in. … Each painting is a short story, and the paintings together suggest a narrative though not necessarily an obvious one, but at the same time, the rectangle is an interesting abstract object.”

“Barbara Buhler Lynes has been recognized as the world’s premier authority on Georgia O’Keeffe, about whom she co-authored the Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonne (1999), and wrote the critical work, O’Keeffe: Stieglitz and the Critics, 1916-1929 (1989), which examined ways that O’Keeffe changed her painting after early critics insisted on reading depictions of female anatomy into her representations.”

“Spanish architect Rafael Moneo, whose designs include the Los Angeles Cathedral, the revamped Stockholm Museum of Modern Art and Madrid’s Atocha Railway Station, has won the Prince of Asturias arts award.”

“In the remote northeastern corner of Guatemala, archaeologists have found what appears to be the 9th century workplace of a city scribe, an unusual dwelling adorned with magnificent pictures of the king and other royals and the oldest known Maya calendar.”

Artists who appropriate images (those not in the public domain) have been facing ever-increasing legal headaches. (Exhibit A: Shepard Fairey.) Appropriators often cite the work of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons as justification. It turns out that those artists may have begun as copyright outlaws, but they ultimately decided that securing rights was more than worth the trouble.

“Before the recession and the return of architectural probity, the phrase ‘like an alien spaceship’ was all over architecture journalism like a cheap suit. … Frank Gehry? Future Systems? Zaha Hadid? Yep, spaceship-mongers. Well there’s only one building where that simile is inescapable, and that’s the Futuro house, designed by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen in 1968.”

“A blond bombshell and a twisted male figure — classic images by Roy Lichtenstein and Francis Bacon — tied for top price at Sotheby’s on Wednesday night, bringing $44.8 million each.”

Opponents of the region’s conservative-led government have launched a website – called “calatravatelaclava (“Calatrava bleeds you dry”) – on which they criticize what they see as the starchitect’s exorbitant design fees for Valencia’s futuristic City of Arts and Sciences.