Category: visual

Focusing on purchases of art from major auction houses by Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, two Russian nationals described as ‘oligarchs’ by the report, the Subcommittee makes a series of pronouncements about the supposed prevalence of money laundering in the art market, and the need for regulation to address this perceived problem. – Apollo

“For almost a century, the lighthouse, near the Cantabrian town of Ajo, was a mute, monochrome sentry beaming its light out over the Atlantic. Now … the 16-metre tower is a collision of colours, geometric shapes and animals, which is intended to boost visitor numbers to one of the lesser known spots on the [northern] coast of Spain.” – The Guardian

The museum’s origins date back more than a century, when it became the first to be dedicated specifically to American art. It’s shocking that the Everson has now chosen to sell off an irreplaceable artifact — a rare formative work by the first American painter with profound international impact. – Los Angeles Times

Its sale will fund acquisitions of work by artists of color, women artists, and other marginalized artists underrepresented in the museum’s collection. The early Pollock painting will be included in Christie’s New York Evening Sale of 20th and 21st Century Art on October 6 and is estimated to sell for between $12 and 18 million. – Hyperallergic

The reason for the orange—and for the wan yellows and sickly grays that followed—is a combination of atmospheric chemistry and the physics of teeny-tiny things. – Wired

The debate over statues—and the wider debates around the Black Lives Matter movement—have thrust the issue of our relationship to history into public consciousness. We should seize this moment to think more deeply about the complexities of the past that have shaped the present. – New York Review of Books

They have used a LiDAR (light-detection and ranging) scanner, which sends out a pulsed laser light towards the target object and measures the time it takes the laser to return. It calculates the distance the light has travelled, and plots that point in a digital 3D space. The LiDAR has recorded inscriptions so high up they cannot be read from the ground. – The Art Newspaper

To mark the place in Pennsylvania where the fourth plane went down on 9/11/01, architect Paul Murdoch and his team designed the Tower of Voices, a 93-foot-tall open-air structure with 40 specially designed and tuned aluminum chimes, one for each passenger and crew member. Carolina Miranda talks to Murdoch and others about the incredible technical and aesthetic (and, yes, political) challenges that building the memorial posed. – Los Angeles Times

“Before the crypt could reopen, masses of toxic lead dust from the fire had to be removed, ancient stones cleaned, ventilation systems vacuumed, lighting and interactive programs reorganized, molds eliminated and anti-COVID measures imposed. … The crypt celebrated the opening with an exhibition on the two 19th-century men who helped restore the 850-year-old medieval monument to greatness: the novelist Victor Hugo and the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.” – Smithsonian Magazine