Category: visual

After thieves chiseled through a wall at Durham University to steal Chinese artifacts worth more than $3 million, police immediately named two suspects, but they just announced that the stolen items have been recovered.

“After a renovation that nearly tripled its size, the revamped Palais de Tokyo swung open its doors Thursday, inaugurating what is now the largest – and perhaps dustiest – contemporary arts center in Europe. The dust is not a mistake. It’s part of an unfinished look meant to inspire artists now allowed to run free within its walls.”

“Inside, it’s a warren of neon plastic slides, tunnels, water jets and pools, alongside elaborate, surreal underwater styling. There’s a lazy river, a 40ft freefall drop inside a plastic tube, and a wave pool designed to mimic the ocean that many Chinese visitors will never have seen.”

“The lazily scrawled navy graffiti stretches no higher than arm’s reach on the thigh of Damien Hirst’s famous sculpture Hymn. It is the Occupy movement’s latest attempt to take action against the free market [sic] and, in this instance, its consequences on art.”

Stolen Pieces, an installation in London by Brooklyn-based artists Eva and Franco Mattes, consists entirely of little fragments of other artworks – by the likes of Beuys, Oldenburg, Koons, Rauschenberg, and even Marcel Duchamp – which the Matteses “appropriated” during the 1990s (meaning that the statute of limitations on the thefts has run out).

“Police in Serbia believe they have recovered an impressionist masterpiece by Paul Cezanne worth at least £68m that was stolen at gunpoint in one of the world’s biggest art heists four years ago, a police official has said.”

Hirst, like Kinkade, “has been criticized for his determined profit-seeking, for inflated prices, for using assistants to produce his work, even for a general lack of originality … But Hirst is seen as a conceptualist – his art is these brilliant money-making ideas themselves. Why don’t we see Kinkade in a similar light? What Kinkade was selling was also ideas: a mythical America, a pink-dawned, Christian cartoonscape of flowers, waterfalls and Disneyland.”

“Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson had been commissioned to create a piece for the event, exploring the benefits of taking a deep breath. But the Olympic Lottery Distributor (OLD) refused the grant saying the piece no longer met its criteria.”

“Google’s gigapixeling equipment and street-view trolleys, with its zoom-discover-play functions, will enter an uncaring universe of Indian museums. Unlike museums in the United States, which are battling a shortage of funds and growing digital lifestyles, Indian museums suffer from a debilitating crisis of imagination and are trapped in an uninspiring sameness – beautiful objects indifferently displayed, impenetrable labels, lack of storytelling and ponderous book-on-the-wall text panels. It is not uncommon to encounter peeling wall paint, cobwebs and even potted plants placed perilously close to moisture-sensitive 12th century sculptures of dancing gods.”

There’s “a towering arch of 50,000 plants rising over a traffic-clogged avenue in a metropolis once called “‘Mexsicko City’ because of its pollution. … One of three eco-sculptures installed across the city by a nonprofit called VerdMX, the arch is both art and oxygenator. It catches the eye. And it gobbles up the carbon dioxide contributing to high ozone levels.”