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A sacred Buddhist hall on the top of Mount Misen in Japan was destroyed by fire—but an “eternal flame” said to have been burning for more than a millennium was rescued and moved to another site, where it continues to glow. As reported in the New York Times , Reikado Hall, in the south of Japan, “was reduced to a charred skeleton after a fire tore through the building, engulfing its wooden prayer rooms.” No one was injured, fortunately, and the flame that had been burning for some 1,200 years was salvaged and transferred to a less traumatized location. In a statement, the Daisho-in temple, which oversaw the damaged hall, said, “We have received many messages of sympathy. Thank you for your concern.” Reikado Hall had been rebuilt after a previous fire in 2005, after an accident following cleanup from a typhoon. The cause of the latest fire in under investigation. The Times noted that Japanese temples and shrines, often constructed with materia...

Harald Metzkes, the so-called “Cézannist of Prenzlauer Berg” who made classically indebted and symbolically rich paintings following Germany’s surrender in World War II, died last Thursday in Brandenburg at the age of 97. His death was confirmed to the German Press Agency by his son, the sculptor Robert Metzkes. “Metzkes became particularly well-known in East Germany because he had no interest in socialist realism,” wrote Monopol , which asserted that he created his own “world theater” in work that wriggled free of East German strictures. The magazine quoted Robert Metzkes saying, of his father, “He wasn’t concerned with implementing cultural policy demands.” Metzkes was born in 1929 in Saxony, Germany, and in 1949 started studying painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1959 he moved to East Berlin, where he established a distinctive painterly style that “combined poetic imagery, references to classical modernism, and deeply symbolic...

When Powerhouse Parramatta, the enormous new cultural center opening in the city of Parramatta west of Sydney, Australia, opens later this year, a new commission by the British-Indian sculptor Bharti Kher will welcome visitors as the entrance. Art Asia Pacific reported the news. The sculpture, titled Tree of Life , will be monumental in scale and will be made up of four stacked bronze and clay heads. Tree of Life is part of Kher’s ongoing “Intermediaries” series , which she began making in 2016. Many of these large-scale sculptures re-create or transform fragments of found ritual objects into hybrid creatures. The Powerhouse Parramatta commission is not Kher’s first foray into public art: from fall 2022 through summer 2023, Ancestor , an 18-foot-tall bronze mother figure also referencing an “Intermediary” piece, was installed in Central Park, and from 2018-20, The Intermediary Family , based on a collection of small clay objects from South India, was install...

James ‘Big Jim’ Kinvig was a leading player for Onslow throughout the 1950s and early 1960s and he played a number of times for the Wellington representative team. Kinvig was well known as a big goal-kicking forward, whose most usual position was lock but he also played at prop and No. 8 throughout his career....

Every time a tech company promotes an emerging technology like AI or the metaverse, the pitch sounds the same: a promise to “unleash” the imagination, or a new “immersive world.” When Facebook rebranded as Meta in 2021, its ad showed four people looking at Henri Rousseau’s Fight Between a Tiger and a Buffalo , as it sprung to life and a portal opened before them. Four years later, when Meta debuted its Ray–Ban Meta smartglasses, the company touted its in-lens display and voice activation with an ad featuring Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt looking at Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian , i.e. the banana, which Hemsworth promptly ate. What does it say about our collective consciousness that the direction of tech innovation seems to always lead to that scene in Mary Poppins , when the nanny and her wards jump onto a chalk drawing and end up in an animated world? That question lay at the center of several works performed at Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS) earlier this month...

She is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an upcoming one at the Tate Modern. Netflix is planning an adaptation of her life. Her unibrowed face stares out from tote bags, murals, notebooks, enamel pins, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room posters across the globe. A recent auction of The Dream (The Bed) , 1940, helped send her market value into yet a higher strata. I speak, of course, of Frida Kahlo. Add to the list a new opera. El Último Sueño de Frida y Dieg o, which recently opened at the Met, stages an oneiric reckoning with two famed painters. The premise is deceptively simple: on a November day in 1957, Frida returns from the underworld during Día de los Muertos for a brief reunion with her husband, who is himself not long for the world of the living. Carlos Álvarez as Diego and Isabel Leonard as Frida in a scene from Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Últi...