The popularity of video games shows no sign of waning, and museums have ramped up their interest in the medium. [...]

“Sorry MoMA, video games are not art” was the headline on Jonathan Jones’s blog [...] after New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) announced the acquisition of 14 video games, including 1980s classics “Tetris” and “Pac-Man”. “All hell broke loose in an interesting way,” said Paola Antonelli, a senior curator in the museum’s department of architecture and design [...]. — theartnewspaper.com

Street artists are showing how they’d map cities differently in a new show that lets visitors step into their clandestine worlds.

[...] Mapping the City, an exhibition of the responses by 50 international street artists to being asked to map their cities “through subjective surveying rather than objective ordinance”. Conventional cartography this is not. — theguardian.com

The perennial tendency to make of beauty itself a binary concept, to split it up into “inner” and “outer,” “higher” and “lower” beauty, is the usual way that judgments of the beautiful are colonized by moral judgments. — brain pickings

Only one of the new buildings is ready, its centrepiece artwork had to be dismantled after bits fell off – and people are more excited about getting their first Ikea. [...]

A €155m new station, designed by Santiago Calatrava as a swooping sci-fi bird, is so far no more than a concrete foundation slab. It replaces a much-loved 1950s station by a local architect, and it’s now optimistically scheduled to open in 2018, having escalated to four times its original budget. — theguardian.com

[ROAR] is concerned about the effects of the $50 million project, which will drill 9,100 holes into the ground, some as deep as 30 feet, and require a crew of 3,000 workers to install over a 27-month period. The area is a habitat for Rocky Mountain Big Horn Sheep, bald eagles, and Peregrine falcons, and the livelihoods of many locals depend on it. — denverpost.com

Damien Hirst’s new art complex in south London, which will house Modern and contemporary works drawn from the artist’s collection as well as natural history objects, will be free of charge when it opens to the public in 2015. After more than a decade in development, the gallery, which runs the length of Newport Street in Vauxhall, is due to open in the summer.

[...] design by Caruso St John Architects, which converts and extends three Grade II-listed theatre carpentry workshops, in 2005. — theartnewspaper.com

a $25.4 million state grant that, matched with upwards of $30 million in private funds, will allow the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) to renovate another 140,000 square feet into gallery space on its 13-acre campus.

While this expansion will make it the largest contemporary art museum in the U.S., MASS MoCA has also been pioneering new economic models, civic engagement strategies and urban design interventions that are relevant for museums in much larger cities. — nextcity.org

Google announced today it’s making a platform available to museums that enables them to build mobile applications that take advantage of Google technology, including Street View and YouTube, to bring their exhibits to anyone with a smartphone. Through partnerships between museums worldwide and the Google Cultural Institute, there are now 11 museums and cultural institutions that have participated in this pilot project to date; their apps are live now on Google Play. — techcrunch.com

[Jeanne Gang] had just come back from a trip on which she’d been using binoculars with Swarovski lenses and had become intrigued by the optical aspect of the crystal company’s output. She had also become interested in James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey, a long-term project that documents glacier shrinkage using time-lapse photography [...]

One challenge the studio faced was communicating the size of the glaciers photographed by Balog, and the extent of the devastation caused by global warming. — designmiami.com

And do you live with as much of the collection as you can?

Absolutely. I never keep fewer than five bronzes in my bedroom. It’s incredible that I have these things. I have them all round my bed—my little friends. I have very little money in the bank. I’m a hyper-materialist; enjoy it while you can. So many of my friends collect money in the way I collect art, but I don’t see the point. — theartnewspaper.com

Only 10 percent of arts graduates make a living from their creative practice. Artist William Powhida maps the institutional structures that keep most artists broke, and shares strategies for spreading the wealth. — Creative Time Reports

Tate Worlds are exciting Minecraft ‘maps’ that present virtual environments inspired by artworks from Tate’s collection. The maps allow players of Minecraft to explore a range of paintings and sculpture, undertaking various activities and challenges that relate to the themes of the artworks, or exploring how they were made. Tate has teamed up with some of Minecraft’s best known mapmakers to create these virtual artworks, offering a unique combination of art, history and adventure. — Tate.org

Until now the Amsterdam museum has usually presented its Van Goghs in a simple chronological sequence, set against white walls. This display originally seemed appropriate for the building’s architecture, a series of stark white galleries designed by Gerrit Rietveld, the leading Modernist architect of the De Stijl movement. The white-cube spaces have now been transformed by coloured walls, varying according to the artist's different periods [...]. — theartnewspaper.com