"The tradition I’m coming from is not pleasure. It’s a certain shamanistic excess" — NYT

Josef Albers’s Manhattan, a mural that enlivened the lobby of New York’s Met Life (previously the Pan Am) Building from 1963 until its controversial removal in 2000, could make a triumphant return to the city. Possible sites include the World Trade Center Transit Hub, The Art Newspaper understands. Finding a suitable home for the work is not the only obstacle: the original mural is in a landfill site in Ohio. — theartnewspaper.com

A newly completed 125 ft high mural painted by Stik on a condemned council owned tower block in Acton, West London is the tallest street artwork in the UK.

The artwork depicts a mother and child looking forlornly from their condemned council block at the luxury apartment complexes being built around them. [...]

Charles Hocking House was built for low income families in 1967 and is earmarked to be torn down in 2016. — streetartnews.net

The idea for Yandex. Street Photographer came to Daniill Maksyokov on a Friday night, while he was surfing the internet [...] “In Yandex.Maps there’s an analogue of Google Street View called Panoramas but it only has views of Russian cities and some former-Soviet countries [...]” say Maksyokov. “What’s more, faces, labels, registration numbers of vehicles and other personal data are not blurred … As a result you have a complete sense of presence and can see everything from a fresh perspective.” — calvertjournal.com

The Whitney Museum of American Art announced today that it will open its new home in Chelsea on 1 May 2015. With double the exhibition space of its "old" Marcel Breuer-designed building, the museum will be able to show far more of its collection of Modern and contemporary American art in its Renzo Piano-designed new space in the Meatpacking District. [...]

Weinberg told us that Piano saved the institution from making one decision that it would have lived to regret. — theartnewspaper.com

How did we come to live in an insular tribal sphere where unwritten rules and rigid moralities — about whom to like and dislike, what is permissible to say and what must remain unsaid — are strictly enforced via social media and online disapproval, much of it anonymous? When did this band of gypsies and relentless radicals get so conservative? — vulture

Neighborhoods of contemporary New York are primarily defined by the choices and actions of the people who call them home. They are collages fashioned from layer upon layer of small accretions that we plaster and paint onto our environments. Sometimes, this paint is literal [...] rich diversity of murals in memoriam found throughout Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn — public artworks that reflect a particular history of violence, racial prejudice, and, in some cases, the mixture of the two. — urbanomnibus.net

The first blows to bring down the Berlin Wall were struck nearly 25 years ago to the day. This was after almost three decades of the concrete barricade cutting through the heart of Berlin and splitting the city in two. Today, Berlin is once again divided, this time by an 11-foot-tall wall of illuminated balloons.

The Lichtgrenze (translation: “border of light”) will stretch for 10 miles along the same path as the original 96-mile structure. — wired.com

As the recipient of Design Miami/’s inaugural Design Visionary award this month, Marino has been celebrated for decades for forward-thinking designs that are the perfect blend of art, fashion and architectural design. “He is a true modernist character [...]” internationally renowned curator Jérôme Sans tells BLOUIN Lifestyle. Sans is curating “One Way: Peter Marino,” an exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art that explores the renowned American architect’s multifaceted relationship with art. — blouinartinfo.com

“He didn’t like people coming into the studio and seeing the paintings before they were finished,” he said. “This is one of the most ambitious artworks ever envisioned, certainly in the United States.”

Heizer's mammoth masterpiece in the desert is called "City."

“It was in 1994 when I first saw it, unfinished,” Govan said. “You do cry. You think, what an incredibly beautiful ambition.” — ksl.com

“People used to complain that people went to New York to buy what they could buy in LA,” said Kathy Halbreich, the associate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I don’t think that happens anymore. I think there’s a recognition that the city matters, that the people aren’t just there for the weather. You see a level of ambition that’s been ratcheted up.” — theguardian.com

Welcome to prison, and a celebration of liberty. Ai Weiwei, the big man of Beijing, has spent years discovering pockets of freedom in the most straitened circumstances, resisting every effort by the Chinese government to shut him down.

This week he opens a major new exhibition in a place that makes that resistance literal: on Alcatraz [...]. The United States has the highest incarceration rate on the planet. But this prison is decommissioned, and Ai is using it to extraordinary effect. — theguardian.com

In July, Anasagasti hired a lawyer and filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit, accusing American Eagle of stealing his work and seeking monetary damages. If it sounds novel to apply copyright to graffiti art, that’s because it is: Lawyers who work in this area say it’s not clear anyone has ever tried this in court. Copyright law, as its name suggests, lays out the rules for when it’s okay to copy something. But does it extend to art that's on public walls? — theatlantic.com