March 01--Oakland lobbies George Lucas for his museum. Damien Hirst's nice new restaurant. A writer asks why there aren't more monuments to women. Plus: Robot critics, easing copyright, downtown L.A.'s new parks and running San Quentin. Here's the roundup:
-- Behold, the robot art critic. For the record, I am not a robot ... not yet.
-- The International Criminal Court at the Hague is trying its first case related to cultural destruction -- specifically, the leveling of ancient mausoleums in Timbuktu by jihadis.
-- The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (smartly) eases restrictions on copyright.
-- As George Lucas' museum plans are held up by lawsuits in Chicago, Oakland makes a pitch to house his 300,000-square-foot show palace.
-- A New York art exhibit that reveals how the Chinese government censors the Internet attracts the attention of the Chinese.
-- Anish Kapoor now has exclusive rights to the world's darkest pigment. Jonathan Jones asks: Can an artist ever truly own a color?
-- From the Department of Incredibly Rich People and Their Shifting Tastes: Microsoft mogul Paul Allen's much-touted Seattle arts space may not be around much longer. Instead, now he's talking about opening a museum to pop culture.
-- Why aren't there more public monuments to women?
-- The U.K. is putting all of its publicly held art online.
-- L.A.'s soon-to-open Museum of Broken Relationships wants tokens of your relationship brokenness.
-- The Huntington has put a trove of newly acquired photorealist paintings on view.
-- Why letting outside communities control how and when objects in museum collections are shown or handled isn't doing anything for open inquiry. (Weisslink)
-- Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks at the design of two important parks in downtown L.A. -- historic Pershing Square and a new park for 1st and Broadway -- and what those spaces tell us about our own urbanism history.
-- "The cost of beauty is often high." New York Magazine architecture critic Justin Davidson says Santiago Calatrava's downtown Manhattan station was worth the dough.
-- Plus, the Dallas Morning News' Mark Lamster asks Mavs owner Mark Cuban not to crowdsource design. Co-sign.
-- It didn't win the Oscar for best animated short (that went to the mournful "Bear Story"), but the Russian short "We Can't Live Without Cosmos" is a beautiful meditation on friendship and space.
-- And since we're on the subject of movies: A Q with Oscar-nominated director Ciro Guerra, whose majestic "Embrace of the Serpent," is a story told like a feverish dream.
-- Great read: Running the San Quentin marathon.
-- And last but not least, the real-world locations of 14 sci-fi dystopias -- a number of which are in Los Angeles.
Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.
