Category: visual

“As befits an event with a truly traumatic status, 9/11 has proved difficult to approach in an uncontroversial way. No work of ‘9/11 Art,’ in fact, seems complete without some commentary on how it fails or does disservice to the true nature of the tragedy — though, of course, this true nature varies depending on who is doing the commentary.”

“Early in his career, Hockney stated his personal credo as ‘I paint what I like, when I like and where I like.’ If his subsequent success has meant he has hardly needed to do anything else, his whims have generally succeeded in striking a chord with the public.”

“Through history the class of enslaved humans has so frequently included women, enslavement taking many forms and varying degrees. Really, only in my own time have women had the freedom to create art on anything remotely approaching an equal basis to men.”

“The opening of the enormous and atmospheric oil tanks in the former power station on the banks of the Thames will provide flexible, subterranean “lunar” spaces and form the foundation for a further expansion of the world’s most visited modern art museum. The expansion will also include a new 64-metre high building and is set to be completed in 2016.”

“The agreement, and the regular movement of the gospel between Durham Cathedral and the British Library, raises many interesting issues—how to weigh the claim of the metropolitan centre, with its global traffic of tourists and scholars, to possess the greatest treasures on the grounds that they are of more than “regional” importance against the claims of a local and religious identity which, unusually, can claim genuine continuity over more than 1,000 years?”

“Is architecture different now, made better by the events of 9/11? Not really, because it remains impossible to anticipate the irrational. In some ways, it is far more likely that Hurricane Irene and other recurring storm hazards will force more visible changes to the built environment.”

“The Tate Modern extension will not be fully open in time for the 2012 Olympics, with £64m still needed to complete the project.”

Witold Rybczynski: “[There] is nothing comforting about gazing into the vast pit – or, rather, two pits – of the 9/11 memorial, the water endlessly falling and disappearing into a bottomless black hole. The strongest sense I came away with was of hopelessness.”

Paul Goldberger: “You wouldn’t mistake it for an ordinary park or urban piazza, but it isn’t a cemetery, either. You feel a sense of dignity and repose, and you see the shapes of the renewed city in the rising skyscrapers, as you should.”

“An unprecedented number of church interiors, liturgical artefacts and period furnishings are for sale in the US while similar material is disappearing in Europe. Many of the objects come from churches that are closing due to declining memberships, an aging population and a shortage of new priests.”