"The Los Angeles County Museum of Art announced on Tuesday that its $750-million fundraising campaign for a new building — the David Geffen Galleries, designed by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor — is 98% complete, now standing at $736 million." - Yahoo! (Los Angeles Times)
"The rules of physics that apply in a real scene appear to be optional in a painting; they can be obeyed or ignored at the discretion of the artist to enhance the painting's intended effect. ... Our visual brain uses a simpler, reduced physics to understand the world." - The MIT Press Reader
Idaho Code 18-8705 states that public funds cannot be used “to perform or promote abortion, provide counseling in favor of abortion, make referral for abortion, or provide facilities for abortion or for training to provide or perform abortion.” - Hyperallergic
Artist Leo Villareal's "Bay Lights" was supposed to be up for two years, and it wasn't designed to withstand the elements for a decade. Enough lights had burned out that it was taken down — to be redesigned and reinstalled, if $11 million can be raised to do so. - The New York Times
"Organizers called Chipperfield's work — more than 100 projects over four decades ranging from cultural, civic and academic buildings to urban planning to residences, and including a recent addition to Berlin's famed Museum Island complex — 'subtle yet powerful, subdued yet elegant.'" - AP
"The reconstruction of Notre-Dame Cathedral is going fast enough to allow its reopening to visitors at the end of 2024, less than six years after a fire ravaged (it), French officials said Monday. ... Yet it will be too late for the Paris Olympic Games scheduled in summer next year." - AP
"'Due to huge demand for extra tickets for the Vermeer exhibition, the website is experiencing problems,' the Rijksmuseum announced on Monday. 'Ticket sales have been shut down until further notice. Sorry for the inconvenience. We are working hard to resolve the situation.'" - ARTnews
In lieu of splattering protected artworks with illicit liquids, XR printed a large banner depicting waist-deep floodwater in Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” (1642) in front of the original painting, commanding museum visitors to “rise up” faster than the sea. - Hyperallergic
I have to admit, ChatGPT’s summary of “The Case Against Art History” sounds convincing on first scan. It feels like it summarizes something in the manner of a typical academic abstract. When I reread it, however, I realize that what it describes is not very specific. - ARTnet
The Warhol foundation has argued that the appeals court decision renders some existing artworks “presumptively unlawful” and “could lead to the removal of seminal works of art from the public sphere.” - The New York Times
The tension between architectural expressionism and restraint is nothing new. Still, there is a kind of reckoning in the field of museum design with the realisation that the tourist-candy structures that went up in recent decades did not succeed in truly making the art institution more accessible. - The Art Newspaper
And that's not an accident, says former Montreal Museum of Fine Arts curator eunice bélidor: "I realized they didn’t care about what I was going to bring here. They just needed me as a good news story." - Hyperallergic
The wide-reaching fraud included three separate groups that traded fake Norval Morrisseau paintings back and forth and created fake certificates of authenticity. More than 1,000 paintings were seized and eight people arrested. - CBC
Some neuroscientists believe "that the mind creates an opinion of an artwork after dissecting it into discrete elements. Basic features, such as color and texture, and complex qualities, like style, are ranked and weighed individually to make a judgment." - Hyperallergic
"Critics say these shifts are purely transactional, with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman trading the appearance of an open culture to paper over a dismal human rights record and buy political capital." - NPR
