Tag: 07.18.08

“What if 30 people got together to buy themselves space in a Jeff Koons? Cemeteries are among the last urban green spaces. They need to be sculpture parks. Forget zombies from the ‘Night of the Living Dead.’ I’d like to see people playing chess among the tombstones, kids skipping rope or texting their friends.”

“The intellectual force of the West is still dominant, but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning, and that less will be based on our models. There are many young, good architects in China. The unanswered question is whether our cooperation, this internationalization, will result in a common language of architecture, whether we will speak two different languages or whether there will be a mixture of the two.”

“Across the Arab world, new museums, funds and foundations have inadvertently exposed a glaring rift between artists of an older generation who paint and sculpt and artists of a younger generation who research and collect. Walid Raad’s current exhibition in Beirut appears to be a serious attempt to make the work of a younger generation visible to an older generation that refuses to see it, and vice versa.”

“Tate Modern, London’s riverside art museum, revised plans for the new wing that architects Herzog & de Meuron are building for it, and said the 2012 opening may be delayed because of tough fundraising conditions.”

“Chunks of frescoes depicting life in the Roman city are missing, carried away by visitors or eroded by the elements. Graffiti is gouged into walls. Tourists ignore signs forbidding flash photography as they take pictures of erotic designs inside the Lupanare, an ancient brothel. The ancient city southeast of Naples has deteriorated so much that Italy declared a state of emergency this month.”