Category: visual

“Those who remember central Cairo before the 1960s speak of its gracious belle époque buildings, smart department stores and lively cafés … [But] the buildings have been decaying for decades … [and] downtown Cairo has grown shabby over the years.” Now a group of Egyptian and Persian Gulf investors are buying up run-down properties in the Egyptian capital with plans to restore their Arab-Baroque and Art Deco beauty.

The mayor of London is promoting the idea of museums imposing US-style suggested admission prices — a plan too “woolly” to work. “A more honest way forward would be to move museums into a ‘National Trust’ arrangement, with charges for one-off visits but also annual or lifetime passes to entice people to return frequently.”

“People who walked into the Empire State Building have done their looking up outside, craning their necks to see the top, 1,250 feet above the street. As they made their way to the observation deck, they had little reason to look up in the cathedral-like lobby. Now there is something to look up at.”

Now on display at the American Museum of Natural History is “an 11-foot-long, brilliantly golden-hued cloth, the first recorded example of a hand-woven brocaded textile made entirely from the silk of spiders.” (Yes, the spiders are gold-colored.)

“The mayor of London … said the US model, where visitors are more robustly asked to pay ‘suggested’ or ‘recommended’ entrance fees, might be better” than the UK’s free model. Johnson “said an American youngster had berated him in New York, asking why London had free museums and not – for example – free hamburgers.”

“After dominating the architecture scene for 40 years, Norman Foster seems to have decided that the world is not enough: his practice has joined a European consortium to look into how future structures could be built on the Moon….”

“[T]he Polaroid Collection has 16,000 prints by 120 recognized masters,” among them Ansel Adams, Phillipe Halsman, Mary Ellen Mark, Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Rauschenberg, Inge Morath, and Margaret Bourke-White. Sotheby’s is to auction 1,300 prints from the collection next spring — though some artists and former employees say Polaroid never owned them.

“Christie’s will auction [Jasper Johns’ ‘Dancers on a Plane’] and other presents to [Merce] Cunningham, the dancer and choreographer who died in July, and his partner in work and life, the composer John Cage, who died in 1992. Proceeds from the sale, expected to total $3.5 million to $5 million, will benefit the Merce Cunningham Trust….”

Thom Mayne has designed the new Perot Museum. “The main gallery spaces will be in a big cube-shaped structure as tall as a 14-story building. It will have a stark, high-tech look, with a 150-foot escalator structure jutting out from the south side. A cutaway corner atrium will offer dramatic views of downtown and at night, dramatic views into the building. The cladding has not been determined.”

“In its inaugural year, ArtPrize, which runs through Oct. 10, features 1,262 professional and amateur artists from 16 countries. They’ve been streaming into Grand Rapids for weeks, transforming 3 square miles of the center city into a playground of imagination. Winners of the $449,000 purse — including a $250,000 grand prize — will be selected by public vote rather than a jury of experts. Some artists are salivating over the cash. Others serve a more quixotic muse.”