Art
Ettore Sottsass's Candy-Colored Utopian Design
The Met Breuer's exhibition makes the case that it wasn’t just an aesthetic Sottsass unleashed on the world, but a particular way of interpreting the past and imagining the future.
Victoria and Albert Museum
In Brief
Leonardo da Vinci's Earliest Notes on Friction Found in Previously Overlooked Marginalia
Some scribbles dismissed in the 1920s by the then-director of the Victoria & Albert Museum as "irrelevant notes and diagrams in red chalk" were recently revealed to represent Leonardo da Vinci's first record of the laws of friction.
Interview
Glenn Adamson on New York and London’s Distinct Museum Cultures
Glenn Adamson recently stepped down from his directorship at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in Manhattan's Columbus Circle, after serving that position for a little less than three years.
News
How Sketchy Is the V&A's "No Sketching" Policy?
People are up in arms about signs at the Victoria and Albert Museum banning not just photography but also sketching in its latest temporary exhibition, Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear.
In Brief
British Photo Community Protests Victoria & Albert’s Acquisition of Regional Archive
A recent decision by trustees of Britain's Science Museum Group (SMG) to transfer around 400,000 photographs from the National Media Museum (NMM) in Bradford to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&H) in London has received outcry from over 80 top photographers, curators, museum administrators, and oth
Books
The Kimono, Examined: A New Book and a Definitive Collection
In the West, is there any garment more elegant than a tuxedo, one that makes its wearer, no matter what size or age, almost always look (and feel) great? In the East — specifically, in Japan — the kimono may be a similar, inestimable costume.
In Brief
Victoria & Albert Amasses World’s Largest Photography Collection at Regional Museum’s Expense
Last week, the Science Museum Group (SMG) and the Victoria and Albert Museum announced what they deemed "a historic agreement": 400,000 objects from SMG’s three-million-strong photography collection, held at the National Media Museum in Bradford, England, will be moved to London's V&A.
In Brief
Design Your Own Marie Antoinette–Style Wig with the V&A's Addictive New Game
More so than the mulleted glam rockers of the 1980s or the beehive-wearing divas of the '60s, 18th-century Europeans were the queens of Big Hair.
News
Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: Elizabeth Hurley sets off alarms at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Florida man's giant chair sculpture angers neighbors, and Egyptian museum project under investigation for embezzlement.
Art
An Addictive Experiment in Annotating Footage from a London Street
In 1974, French writer Georges Perec's "An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris" is part of the inspiration behind Kyle McDonald's new online interactive Exhausting a Crowd.
News
For #MuseumWeek, Institutions Share Their Secrets Online
What are museums hiding in their pasts and inside their collection storage vaults? Some of those secrets (or just lesser-known facts) are being shared by institutions around the world this Museum Week through the hashtag #secretsmw.
Opinion
Stop Self-Censoring
It's been three weeks since two masked gunmen stormed into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and killed 11 people. In that time there's been self-censorship — quite a bit of it.