Author: Douglas McLennan

VENICE UNDER WATER

This month Venice has recorded its third-worst flood since 1900, endangering the city’s artwork and buildings. The city wants to work on building new barriers to keep the water out but environmentalists oppose the idea. – The Art Newspaper

  • WHY NO BARRIERS? There is a fear that by closing them for 100-300 hours a year—and there are some 8,600 hours in a year—it would affect the exchange of water between the sea and the lagoon, and that the lagoon would become polluted. As the Special Law for Venice says that the lagoon is inseparable from the historic city, it is not possible to act on one part rather than the whole. – The Art Newspaper

DESIGN TRIUMPH

The controversy that plagued the British Museum every step of its redesign – including the public outcry over its use of the wrong kind of stone in its new $97 million portico – seems to have finally subsided. “To visitors to the Great Court, this storm in a wine goblet will mean little if anything. In 10 years, few will know or care what all the fuss was for. What they will know, instead, is one of the most extraordinary covered squares to be found in any city, ancient or modern. – The Guardian

FEMINISM LITE

  • The US’s first women’s museum opened in Dallas last month, but visitors are unlikely to walk away with a broad knowledge of women’s accomplishments, artistic or otherwise. “[The Women’s Museum] is an institution as notable for what it omits as what it contains, a watery survey of female accomplishment that for the most part glosses over the conditions – i.e., a couple of centuries of sexual inequality and its attendant ills – that make such an institution necessary in the first place.” – Salon

THE ROWDY MUSEUM NEXT DOOR

Melbourne’s new $290 million museum, which opened last month, has upset its neighbors. “They appear to be desperately reacting to their own financial difficulties by panicking into holding activities which will not only degrade the Museum of Victoria but also degrade the Carlton area and alienate the residents.” – Financial Review

NOT SO FAST

Just a few years ago the internet was being touted as likely to revolutionize the world of art sales. Its success hasn’t been nearly so pervasive, but “even the skeptics did not predict the problems that have since assailed art and antiques online sites. The weakest have closed, some are desperately in need of more cash from increasingly skeptical venture capitalists, others have seen their share prices plunge and even Sotheby’s has been forced to amalgamate its two sites.” – The Telegraph (UK)

STILL STANDING

Arthur Miller is about to open another play on Broadway. And he’s about to turn 85. “Over the years, the critics have been all over the lot when it comes to judging Miller’s work. But in 1984, the critics and the public began re-examining Miller. And most of them liked what they found. So when he accepted the Tony for ‘Death of a Salesman’ last year, it wasn’t without a sense of well-earned, well-honed, irony – a sense that he’s been one of the victims in ‘The Crucible’ who finally got the chance to put his torturers on trial.” – Boston Globe

REVIVING NEA SUPPORT

Since taking the helm of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998, chairman Bill Ivey has been largely responsible for the NEA’s renewed support in Washington. The Senate approved a $7 million budget increase this year in part due to Ivey’s promise to spread NEA dollars around the country and increase access to the arts in rural areas. – Nando Times (AP) 11/26/00

CONSIDER THE ARTIST MANAGER

  • Artists have no problem with paying managers commission when they [the artists] aren’t earning money but as soon as they do, some of them become resentful, forgetting the blood, sweat and tears you have put in over the formative years. Every manager dreams of discovering and nurturing that talent, not out of vanity but through entrepreneurial ambition. They have careers to pursue, but people seem to think they are doing it for fun.” – The Observer (UK) 11/26/00