Anne d’Harnoncourt: Discerning Enthusiasm for Art: Ms. d’Harnoncourt was a natural museum director in perhaps the best, most basic way. She had the kind of star quality that lights up rooms, but also the confidence to let her curators shine, knowing that their achievements reflected well on her and on the museum she loved so deeply. [NYT]
The Falls Guy: But Eliasson’s spectacle is much more complicated than The Gates, which consisted of thousands of saffron flags planted along 23 miles of paths. Robert Benazzi, the hydraulics designer working with Eliasson, created a system that will suck up the East River, lift it ten stories into the air, and drop it back down, thousands of gallons a minute. He says the only comparably complex job in his 40-year career was designing the sprinkler system for the Sears Tower. [NY Mag]
The Lure of the Curve: Rococo is the style that will not die. Born in France in the 18th century as a revolt against the ceremonial classicism of the court of Louis XIV at Versailles, it spread throughout Europe, to Britain, and across the Atlantic to the American colonies, where its hedonistic exuberance was cooled temporarily by revolutionary tastes. [WSJ]
An Artist’s Vision: Building With Toys, but on a Grand Scale: But not far from him, partly shrouded on the trailer of a red Peterbilt truck, sat a sculpture made of hundreds of thousands of such pieces, painstakingly screwed together into a sturdy, almost crystalline creation. In essence, he had transformed a toy inspired by Manhattan buildings into a toy building approaching the size of some real buildings in Manhattan. [NYT]
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