Category: visual

“Who are the real King Kongs of architecture in 2010? The list is surprisingly short: Norman Foster heads it, standing imperiously aloof from Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Herzog and de Meuron, and Rem Koolhaas. Their buildings have “signature” design qualities.”

The cement panels are now sagging and crumbling, and the paint is flaking off. The East Side Gallery has been restored, for the second time, at a cost of €2m – money well spent as it is now Berlin’s leading visitor attraction. Many of the tourists are unaware that the slick images they have come to see were no part of the historic wall.

Michael Rush: “Friendships were strained. People would sometimes walk the other way when they saw me coming. I had been friendly with the president and provost before this. One day later, I was their enemy.”

“The funding and business side of the visual arts has traditionally been dominated by trust funds, the rich and corporate City patrons. There is evidence that this is starting to change. As the music business became more lucrative, so artists such as Madonna, Sir Elton John, Jarvis Cocker, Brian Eno and his ex-band mate Bryan Ferry invest much of their accumulated wealth in both modern and classical art.”

“Art is the way that life tests and expresses itself, without which we are already dead. But what happens to your enthusiasm for belonging and contributing to this system of distribution when you are told that we have 96 months before the tipping point, when the feedback systems of man-made global warming take over – probably resulting in tens of millions of climate-change refugees displaced and made homeless by the end of this century?”

“Today, surrounded by the dated detritus of subsequent federal patronage, ridiculed by the cultural establishment as a fossil, built by an architect whose era had passed, funded by a besieged capitalist, filled with treasures confiscated by Communists and bequeathed to the American people in one of the most generous acts of democratic beneficence, the National Gallery remains a masterpiece–a timeless work of art that has never failed to inspire and move the millions of visitors who pass through its luminous space.”

“Even auction house pundits could not conceal their astonishment at the miraculous outcome of Sotheby’s Wednesday evening sale, when only three lots of the 77 that came up failed to find takers and the total posted rose to £54.07 million, or about $84.5 million. They still are not quite sure how that came about.”

“Members of the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union intend to walk out for two hours on 16 February to protest at their pay rates. Union members said some of the workers’ pay fell 60p short of London’s so-called “living wage” of £7.60 an hour.”

“Many of the architects I respect in the 20th century – they kept designing houses until they died. Now many big architects after they start designing buildings, stop designing houses because it not interesting commercially. The effort is so big but the profit is so small. Designing office buildings is much easier than a house. You design for an average. But for a house, it is a particular request for each client and there is no repetition of rooms.”

“When the Musée National Picasso, Paris, closed its doors in August for a $28 million renovation, the scoop was that its 5,000 artworks … would be locked away for more than two years. … Well, someone somewhere along the line changed his or her mind. And the Seattle Art Museum is the first American beneficiary of that change of heart.”