Nuns at the Border by Bruce Berman

Tino Sehgal at Tate, managing MOCA and the postman who collected Ed Ruscha and Donald Judd

Phaidon's daily look at the best art, architecture, design and photography stories on the web

Art

Mail man who collected Donald Judd, Ed Ruscha dies Herbert Vogel an 89-year-old New Yorker who amassed an incredible collection of contemporary American art, despite earning a modest salary as a postal worker, died earlier this week. Vogel and his wife Dorothy, lived on Dorothy’s librarian’s salary, while they used his income to buy art.

Tino Sehgal's Associations wows critics The Guardian’s Adrian Searle describes Tino Sehgal’s These Associations, as one of the Turbine Hall’s best commissions. The work encourages visitors to engage with each other, interacting around works of sound, dance and movement,  and other ‘constructed situations.’ As The Times’ Rachel Campbell Johnson asserts, Seghal is hugely ambitious to work with nothing less than human society as his material.

Management, the MOCA way Why is Eli Broad, the property billionaire behind the appointment of pop art maven Jeffery Deitch to the directorship of LA’s Musuem of Contemporary Art, under fire for his management of the gallery? Perhaps some clue lies in his recent management book, The Art of Being Unreasonable. As one Yale professor puts it, appointing Deitch over erstwhile director Paul Schimmel, “is like cashing in all your value stocks and doubling down on junk bonds.”

 

Photography

The World in London As part of the cultural Olympiad, London’s Photographers’ Gallery, has commissioned 204 buddy photographers to shoot 204 portraits of Londoners born in each of the countries competing in the games. The show opens on Friday.

Does flash photography really damage art? That’s certainly the claim made by galleries keen to ban the photographing of their works. However, a careful review of the evidence suggests that most commercial camera flashes don’t actually affect artworks. So, why do galleries persist with the ban? 

Mexico, before the cartels For a more innocent view of the troubled US/Mexican border, the NPR photoblog has uncovered this series of photographs, by Bruce Berman, associate professor at New Mexico State University. Beginning in the eighties, Bermans’ The Border Project details a more innocent time in North American border relations.

 

Architecture

Foster + Partners up for Lubetkin award RIBA has announced the shortlist for its Lubetkin award. The prize is named in honour of the Georgia-born architect, who worked in Paris before coming to London in the 1930s to establish the influential Tecton Group. Buildings on the shortlist include Foster + Partners’ Sperone Westwater gallery in New York; the Guangzhou International Finance Centre in China, designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects, Kuala Lumpar’s One KL  residential block by SCDA Architects, and the Solaris building in Singapore by TR Hamzah and Yeang and CPG.

The BBC seen through its buildings Has the British Broadcasting Corporation changed from ‘paternalistic bureaucracy to cowed pseudo-business’ as it moves from Bush House to MediaCityUK? That’s architecture critic Owen Hatherley’s take on the beeb and its buildings

Landmark buildings that never were Speaking of the BBC, it's just published a rather good round-up of great British buildings that never made it to completion. How different would the country be if Liverpool had a cathedral 60ft higher than Rome’s St Peters, or would we be if there were a pyramidic mausoleum in Primrose Hill, packed with five million bodies?

Design

Rio 2016's typeface Those disappointed with London 2012’s graphics might want to console themselves with the smooth lines chosen for Rio 2016’s Olympic typeface. Designed by the Brazilian arm of London font agency Dalton Maag, it  ‘suggests the movements of athletes in action’ and is apparently ‘inspired by the joyfulness of the Brazilian people’.

The aussie iPod? Sydney-born John van den Nieuwenhuizen, a former product designer for HP, has high hopes for his Hidden Radio, a portable Bluetooth speaker for mobile devices, influenced by Apple’s design philosophy, as well as the work of the great  Dieter Rams. "A lot of people think to make a product more competitive you have to add more stuff but I think it's what you take away that makes a product truly great," he says.

Here’s to failure British design champion James Dyson says success is overrated. In an age of perceived instant success, hard graft and the lessons learnt by sucessive setbacks can be overlooked. “Failure is painful, but it spurs on improvement like nothing else,” he blogs in the Guardian.