• A Los Angeles federal judge has ruled that a lawsuit may proceed for the return of a Nazi-looted painting from Spain’s Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection Foundation to its rightful owner, the heirs of Lilly Cassirer Neubauer. The painting, Pissarro’s Rue Saint Honoré—Afternoon, Rain Effect (1897), was relinquished to Nazi officials in 1939 to obtain visas for Neubauer to flee Germany. The case will proceed to trials court unless the US Supreme Court decides to review the ruling. Read the full article at The Art Newspaper. • Japanese filmmaker and comic-book illustrator Satoshi Kon died on Tuesday in Tokyo, at the age of forty-six. Kon’s animated films, such as Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, and more recently Paprika, received critical acclaim both in Japan and in the international community. Susan J. Napier, a professor of Japanese studies at Tufts University, identified Kon as “part of a line of great Japanese humanist directors and writers.” From ArtForum. • “Big Sign – Little Building” is the name of a new exhibition at the Office for Contemporary Art Norway, in Oslo. A curatorial statement claims the show will investigate the “expanded temporal and spatial field for cultural production resulting from the modern shift in the notion of landscape from the Kantian sublime to the space of leisure time.” Artwork by Robert Smithson, Ed Ruscha, Claes Oldenburg and other contemporary artists will be featured, along with the original glass slides used by the late architect Steven Izenour in his academic lectures. Check out e-flux for more information. • Los Angeles Times art critic and “Culture Monster” Christopher Knight reports that the design submitted by architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro to Eli Broad for his forthcoming art museum contains the same “mistake” as Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art (also designed by DS+R) – that the galleries are too distant from the front entrance of the museum. Read his interesting argument at the Los Angeles Times website.