Artist Simon Beck must really love the cold weather! Using snow as his playground he wears raquettes (snowshoes) and creates awesome artworks. If you jaw has not dropped yet, just think of it this way. He literally works 5-9 hours a day walking in order to create his pieces. Along the frozen lakes of Savoie, France, he spends days mapping out the ideas.
The original Statue of Liberty torch — 3,600 pounds of copper and glass, and 16 feet tall — is being moved to the other side of Liberty Island. It took two years of worry and strategizing, but the day of truth is about to arrive for Doug Phelps. As part of a $100 million upgrade, the construction crew is moving the original Statue of Liberty torch from its resting place inside the statue’s pedestal, where it’s been on display since it was replaced in 1986, and relocating it to a new museum in Liberty Island.
On a snowy evening in New York City, David Hockney’s 1972 painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool With Two Figures) sold at auction for a jaw-dropping $90.3 million, shattering the previous world record for a work sold at auction by a living artist—Jeff Koons’s Balloon Dog, which went for $58.4 million back in 2013. It also far exceeded the estimated sale price of $80 million, which itself would have been a record. What do these kinds of prices say about the state of the art world, and of the world in general?
Architects created ambitious spaces with an eye toward the sensory in a series of museums, memorials and public places such as the the Museum at the Gateway Arch, St. Louis seen above. If there are themes connecting the best architecture of 2018, one of them is certainly the eagerness of architects to give shape to complex and varied experiences, the more sensory the better. This is architecture that offers a sequence of events revealed gradually with constantly shifting perspectives, as opposed to classic modernism’s tightly controlled image of architecture as geometric tableau.
