Category: visual

“Many of its finest masterpieces have been cleaned within an inch of their aesthetic life.” They have been subject “to scientific cleansing and treating conservation less as a subjective exercise than as a work of chemistry.”

“If the Burj Dubai is too shiny, confidently designed and expertly engineered to be a ruin itself, it is surely the marker — the tombstone — for some ruined ideas.”

“Even by the standards of an emirate which has created miles more beach front by building vast islands from millions of tonnes of sand in the shapes of palms, the tower stands out as Dubai’s most remarkable achievement yet.Around 12,000 people are expected to live and work in the tower which is part of a 500-acre development known as “downtown” Burj Dubai.”

“A security guard noticed Les Choristes (The Chorus) – on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – was missing from the city’s Cantini Museum on 31 December. Public prosecutor Jacques Dallest said there were no signs of a break-in.”

“The plan for Rome’s new €150m Maxxi museum, designed by Zaha Hadid, looks like a diagram of a highly complex railway junction. It is hardly the most romantic image for a building billed as the city’s first major gallery of contemporary art, due to open in the spring.”

“Over the past decade the number of artists has indeed continued to increase, but so has the tally of good ones. The years 2000 to 2009 saw the emergence of a tremendous number of really good, interesting, promising artists. They came from around the world and every demographic, working in every medium.”

“In the real world the news of the decade was 9/11, two awful wars, staggering corporate greed and the election of an African-American president. In the art world a big event was Mr. Koons showing his sculptures at Versailles. In short, life passed art by. Maybe in the new decade they’ll meet.”

“Over the summer the French Senate announced that it would close the museum that shares its lodgings in the Palais du Luxembourg. … When the current exhibit, on glass works by Louis Comfort Tiffany, closes on January 17, the museum will be dark until a new [private] company is authorized to reopen the museum, supposedly in 2011.”

“The aerosol painter from Bristol stands accused of disrespecting a graffiti legend by modernising a 24-year-old work by ‘King Robbo’ in Camden, North London. On Christmas Day, a few days after Banksy’s latest spray paint spree, Robbo responded in kind by obliterating the artist’s work with 3ft high silver letters spelling out his name.”

“With the major museums gasping for cash like whales beached on a dropping economic tide, and the federal government tightening the reins on culture spending, it was the little fish that were still swishing their tails and swimming free.”