Category: visual

Nicolai Ouroussoff: The “coolly experimental” Wyly Theater (Koolhaas/Prince-Ramus) and the Winspear Opera House (Foster), a “traditional take on civic architecture cloaked in a modern wrapper,” help fill out the city’s Cultural District “with the kind of strong, serious forms that can begin to give Dallas the cultural presence that it has never had.”

Anthony Gormley’s Trafalgar Square plinth project featured 2,400 people climbing up to do their thing on the pedestal. What’s it all mean? Perhaps it says something about the relationship between people and the big institutions that surround the square…

“Cheers rang out around the historic square just after 9am today as the final plinther Emma Burns, a 30-year-old medical photographer from Darlington, County Durham, was guided down after finishing her stint.”

“The collection is housed in a discrete building that will, or so we are told, replicate the scale, proportion, and configuration of the old galleries, at least on the inside. This is good news, although the addition among the galleries of classrooms and an internal garden, which will disturb the intense art experience of the original plan, is disturbing.”

“The structure,” a sculpture by Miroslaw Balka, “is enormous … and once inside it, visitors will walk into complete blackness hoping – presumably – that they don’t then bump or knock into fellow art-lovers. Tate Modern said health and safety had been on its mind and the space will be regularly patrolled by attendants with torches.”

According to “something called the ‘Skyscraper index’, … the construction of super-tall buildings is often a sign that an economic downturn is on the way. The best example is the late 1920s, which saw an unprecedented skyscraper boom prior to the Great Depression.”

“If the past 50 years have taught us anything, it’s that eyesores are in the eye of the beholder. Buildings erected and resented in the 1950s now are eligible for landmark status. … [I]f a structure being renovated today includes the faded paint of a long-gone advertiser, you can count on planners wanting it restored as a historic element.”

A portrait in chalk, pen and ink, which was designated “‘German, early 19th century’ and sold for $19,000 at Christie’s New York in the late 1990s,” is now said to be a Leonardo, based on multispectral images that literally show “the hand – and fingerprint – of the artist in the work.”

“As the recession drags on and storefronts across New York remain empty, commercial landlords are turning to an unlikely new class of tenants: artists, who in flusher times tend to get pushed out rather than lured in. And the price of entry is not deep pockets, but vivid imaginations and splashy exhibits….”

“I believe there was something magical about how ArtPrize saturated the city with more than 1,200 pieces of new art and galvanized public conversation, and I think the competition’s uniquely democratic ethos has a valuable role to play in a world filled with juried art contests and fairs. But I was still concerned that a gimmicky work was going to win.”