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The Art Of 7-11 (And Other Businesses)

At a time when some American cities are cutting back on public art, “Menlo Park (Cal.) now requires that public art adorn new commercial buildings and major remodeling. Early next year, Menlo Park residents will see the fruits of this new law when art is installed at the 7-Eleven, a cafe, and a Chevron gas station. To some, it’s a smart way to further beautify this bedroom community without using city money. To others, making business owners spend 1 percent of a project’s cost on art is an expensive annoyance.”

Should Barnes Temporarily “Sell” Some Art To Survive?

Is survival of the Barnes Collection depandant on moving to downtown Philadelphia? Another “solution” has been proposed by art dealer James Maroney. “The plan, which Maroney considers a form of legal “tenancy in common,” appears relatively simple: A selected number of Barnes’ paintings, not currently on display, would be sold to interested art collectors for the duration of the buyers’ lifetimes, but returned to the Barnes Foundation upon their deaths. Maroney said that the novel plan would raise money while imposing less “damage to Dr. Barnes’ vision than certain other proposals … .”

WTC – Are Architects The Only Ones Who Understand?

Why did we end up with such bad designs for the WTC memorial, wonders Jerry Saltz. “How could something so important and sensitive, something so in need of an inspired touch and more time, go so wrong, so quickly? To answer this we need to look back to a month after September 11, when the air was still acrid with the smell of the smoldering wreckage, and the managerial mindset that brought us to this point surfaced. At a packed assembly of architects in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, professionals from all over the globe met and listened to dozens of their own speak about the tragedy in ways I hadn’t heard before or, thankfully, since. I love contemporary architecture, but I was appalled by the breathtaking opinion, expressed by many in attendance, that architects were the only ones who understood the site ‘in the deepest sense’.”

Scotland’s Year In Art

“Monet was the National Galleries’ big hit. You might have thought we knew Monet well enough, but no fewer than 170,000 people visited the Monet exhibition to get a fresh insight into his work. It was the biggest attendance ever for an exhibition in Edinburgh and it must be a comment on something that we have not been doing in between that the previous record of 120,000 visitors was held by the Epstein exhibition in Waverley Market more than 40 years ago.”

Why Do You Like “Rings” So Much?

Why is Lord of the Rings so popular? An academic study is underway to find out. “Deploying 13 languages on the internet, researchers from universities in 20 countries are asking a series of questions of fans in an attempt to pin down the attractions of fantasy fiction. The questions are targeted exclusively at admirers of JRR Tolkien’s trilogy, including posers like “Where and when is Middle Earth to you?” which would baffle the uninitiated. The study is being publicised in almost every country, from China to Colombia, to search out national variations in response to the books and films.”

Ballard: Why I Turned Down The Queen’s Honor

Why did writer JG Ballard recently turn down an honor from the Queen that would have made him a Commander of the Brtitish Empire? “It goes with the whole system of hereditary privilege and rank, which should be swept away. It uses snobbery and social self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole. We are a deeply class-divided society.”

Light Up London (But No Controversial Images, Please)

A holiday project to project images on buildings in London has hit a snag. “The project began with the projection of sunflowers onto the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner on December 2 and has grown slowly, culminating with the illumination of Buckingham Palace tonight. All 10 buildings in the scheme will then be lit up each evening until New Year’s Eve. But pictures commissioned by pop star Damon Albarn – one of many celebrities taking part at the request of co-organiser Bob Geldof – proved too contentious to be projected onto London venues such as the National Theatre.”

The Power Struggle Behind The Freedom Tower

The uneasy agreement between Daniel Libeskind and David Childs that resulted in the new Freedom Tower design unveiled last Friday was “the result of a whirlwind of intense, sometimes fiery meetings over the course of the last week. During most of that time, staffers from studio Daniel Libeskind were banned from the 40 Wall Street offices of [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,] where the two camps had been working. As a result, both sides were barely speaking to one another.” In fact, Skidmore staffers accused Libeskind employees of “a Watergate-style break-in,” with Libeskind’s camp accusing of David Childs of intentionally diverging from the agreed-upon framework for the design. All in all, it’s something of a wonder that a design was ever agreed upon.

Up All Night, Staring At A Screen

Advertisers are famously obsessed with young people, and so television, by necessity, is obsessed as well. In recent years, network brass have been at a loss to explain where all their young viewers have gone. Some say they went to cable, some say they went to the internet, and some say it shouldn’t matter, anyway. But what if the 18-to-34s haven’t deserted TV after all? What if they’ve just moved their “prime time” back a few hours? A close look at demographic ratings shows that young people are watching plenty of TV: they’re just turning on the set a lot later.