A court in Venice has refused to fast-track a legal claim filed by the Icelandic Art Center (IAC) seeking the reopening of artist Christoph Büchel’s mosque, which launched earlier this year in a disused church in Venice as part of the Biennale.

The IAC is the commissioner of the controversial project, which was housed in the former Catholic church [...]. The mosque closed at the end of May after only two weeks when city officials claimed that it breached health and safety regulations. — theartnewspaper.com

This week, the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London announced that “the world’s longest and tallest tunnel slide” will wrap around Anish Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit.” When the sculpture went up in 2009 after winning a design challenge, it proceeded to receive mostly scathing reviews — and a spot on the shortlist of the 2012 Carbuncle Cup [...]. Today, Kapoor revealed that the slide is actually a work of art, designed by none other than Carsten Höller at Kapoor’s own invitation. — hyperallergic.com

Architect Frank Gehry has often talked about the influence artists have had on his building designs. [...] An early work from the 1960s by sculptor Larry Bell in the Frank Lloyd show offers a partial template for a Gehry design built three decades ago in Toluca Lake.

Gehry's World Savings and Loan branch at Riverside Drive and Mariota Avenue is a sky-lighted, one-story hall framed by tall facades out front and in the back, as if a full second story had been planned but never built. — latimesblogs.latimes.com

Major public cultural institutions in Greece are on the point of collapse, say leading Greek art professionals, as concerns mount that the country faces insolvency after 61% of the population rejected bailout proposals earlier this week made by international creditors. — theartnewspaper.com

What rights does a muralist have to the wall she painted on?

That's a question that echoes throughout the country right now, as muralists try to lay claim to their artwork under the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990. [...]

California muralist Kent Twitchell was in a hotel room in Sausalito, Calif., when he got the call — his six-story mural of Ed Ruscha in Los Angeles had been painted over. — npr.org

In Beijing, Ai Weiwei is back with a vengeance. The dissident Chinese artist has had four solo shows in the Chinese capital, ending an implicit exhibition ban that had been in place since his arrest in 2011. The fact that the shows, which opened in June, were permitted with minimal interference beyond one amended opening date surprised everyone, including Ai. “I never planned to have a few shows all at once,” Ai tells us. — The Art Newspaper

The Tom Bradley International Terminal at LAX debuted this week three new public art commissions designed to greet departing and arriving passengers and provide a measure of calm and reflection amid the chaos of air travel.

The artists involved all have strong ties to Los Angeles -- Mark Bradford, Pae White and the Ball-Nogues studio each resides or works in the L.A. area. — latimes.com

The project, called Underline, will include the underground’s first music commission and a plan by the Turner prize-nominated architectural collective Assemble to improve what is regarded as one of the most unloved station exits on the entire network, at Seven Sisters in north London. — theguardian.com

Opening in October, Newport Street Gallery is the realisation of Hirst’s long-term ambition to share his diverse collection – which includes over 3,000 works – with the public. [...]

Designed by architects Caruso St John, Newport Street Gallery spans 37,000 square feet, which includes a restaurant and shop. Its construction has involved the conversion of three listed Victorian buildings [...]. — Damien Hirst

Herzog & de Meuron, the Basel-based architecture studio that designed London’s Tate Modern, is due to redevelop Berlin’s famous art squat Tacheles. The massive warehouse, in the now fashionable Mitte district, was occupied by artists after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A symbol of the city’s subculture, Tacheles became a major tourist attraction. In 2012, the authorities closed the art centre amid widespread protests by artists and anti-gentrification campaigners. — theartnewspaper.com

“Money is not an issue here” is the motto that leaps out at you in both the Prada and Vuitton Foundation museums, although in Paris it is thrown into high relief on the building’s facade by the almost vulgar silver logo of Louis Vuitton—the star company in the LVMH group. — The Art Newspaper

You might be unsure of exactly what you’re looking at when you first see the images in Roland Fischer’s series “Facades.” [...]

“I noticed all these new buildings mushrooming everywhere, giving the impression that they could as well be from any other major town in the world,” Fischer wrote via email. “I thought that this was a new urban visual experience, a consequence naturally of the then still new process of globalization.” — slate.com

Dasha Zhukova’s Garage Museum for Contemporary Art is due to open the doors of its new $27m home in Gorky Park to invited guests on 10 June and the public two days later. The museum is housed in a Soviet-era pavilion that has been converted by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas [...].

In another riff on the building’s architecture, Garage will be hosting a conference in October on Soviet Modernism, a project of the Austrian curator Georg Schöllhammer [...]. — The Art Newspaper

The Frick Collection has yielded.

Facing a groundswell of opposition to a proposed renovation that would have eliminated a gated garden to make way for a six-story addition, the museum — long admired for its intimate scale — has decided to abandon those plans and start over from scratch. [...]

With the proposed renovation, designed by Davis Brody Bond, the Frick, on East 70th Street in Manhattan, had sought to increase its exhibition space [...]. — nytimes.com

The police in Venice closed an art installation in the form of a functioning mosque on Friday morning, after city officials declared the art project a security hazard and said that the artist who created it, Christoph Büchel, had not obtained proper permits and had violated laws by allowing too many people inside the mosque to worship. — NYT