Category: visual

Long before virtual reality, and less digital (and perhaps less nausea-inducing), camera enthusiasts with money could create 3-D panoramas. “The technology was introduced commercially in 1947 by the David White Company of Milwaukee, maker of the Stereo Realist camera, which had two lenses, placed about eye-width apart, to replicate the way the human brain sees three-dimensional space. The camera used slide film, and a special hand-held viewer was required for maximum wow.” – The New York Times

The past year has been shocking and a reversion to old, terrible ways, say the artists, galleries, and other prominent people in the Australian art scene. For instance: “‘We have called police to extricate dialysis patients from painting sheds where they have been locked into premises, and dealt with the stress caused for people in debt to unethical dealers through loans given to them or their family members,’ the director of the Purple House dialysis clinic in Alice Springs, Sarah Brown, wrote.” – The Guardian (UK)

Steve Lazarides also recalls the early days, including the day Banksy strapped a helium-filled sex doll to a McDonald’s-branded balloon and released it into the sky. Many different police officers, he says, saw the stunt, “thought we could do something about this, but 1,000 tourists are going to take our picture and we’re going to look like absolute dicks, so they just drove off.” – HuffPost

“There is this great shift in what’s going on in collecting,” said Sara Friedlander, Christie’s head of postwar and contemporary art. “Collectors across the board are looking for something new that is also of great quality—in concert with what’s happening curatorially in museums and in scholarly gallery shows.” The result, she said, is “shifting the conversation away from simply dead white men to artists of color and women.” – ARTnews

These ten museums opened in 2019. We’re not saying they’re the best, but they sure are fun buildings to look at. – Dezeen

The Hermitage in St. Petersburg has just opened a branch in Omsk, the Pushkin in Moscow is setting up in Samara and Nizhny Novgorod, and both museums are making plans to open outposts in Yekaterinburg. Similar plans are in the works from Kaliningrad (wedged between Poland and Lithuania) to Tomsk in Siberia to Khabarovsk in the Far East and (especially) Vladivostok on the Sea of Japan. – The Art Newspaper

“A civil engineer named Tamim Kasmo, 73, has joined a team of architects and engineers, stonemasons and woodworkers who have taken on the task of rebuilding the [12th-century] mosque. … Kasmo’s team must put the minaret back up and repair the broken columns, scorched ceilings, and bullet-scarred walls of the prayer hall and arcades that surround the courtyard.” – Atlas Obscura

Berlin’s most prominent art fair evolved out of its previous iteration, Art Berlin Contemporary, and was held for the past three years in the historic Tempelhof airport each September, showing mostly contemporary art. But the fair’s owner which also runs Art Cologne, has decided after months of discussions that the conditions in Berlin are too unpredictable for its liking. – Artnet

If you don’t like something that’s presented as art, if you think it’s offensive or stupid, go ahead and say it’s offensive and stupid. I’m an art critic, I will be right there with you. But to say simply that it’s not art is, for me, a cop-out. – Washington Post

“The 4.5-metre-long panel … seems to depict wild pigs found on Sulawesi and a species of small-bodied buffalo, called an anoa. These appear alongside smaller figures that look human but also have animal traits such as tails and snouts.” – Nature