Category: visual

Culture and Sport Glasgow has exercised “troubling scrutiny” over the Gallery of Modern Art’s “Sh(OUT) exhibition, a taboo-shattering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex collection. Despite the irony in censoring a show that promotes equality and human rights, CSG and GoMA have been practising just that from the outset.”

The Smithsonian Institution says it “made an error in allowing the Federation for American Immigration Reform to hold an event Tuesday night at the National Postal Museum.” FAIR advocates “a temporary moratorium on all immigration”; Smithsonian policy bars rentals to “groups which are partisan, political or religious in nature.”

The logo for the Tea Party Patriots’ Sept. 12 “Taxpayer March on DC” incorporated a line of raised fists straight out of 1920s Soviet agitprop. Surprising? It was deliberate, according to an internal e-mail.

The proposal by Santa Monica architect Tommy Landau “is envisioned for a man-made island in Abu Dhabi, if leaders of the oil-rich emirate decide they want to make a statement to rest of the world and perhaps one-up neighboring Dubai.” Contingent, of course, upon a revival of the collapsing real estate market in the Emirates.

At 47, Takashi Murakami “is already turning fatalistic. The art world wunderkind,” now embracing self-portraiture, “believes that the real battleground for artists lies not in the time when they are alive, but in the future after they are dead.”

“[W]hile its title — ‘Whirls and Twirls (MTA)’ — may sound more like an amusement park ride than an artwork, the eye-popping palette and monumental scale are bolder than most of the art in the subways, a surprising visual jolt for the estimated 69,000 commuters who use the station every day.”

“The Charity Commission has asked the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment to explain its relationship with the heir to the throne, amid concerns that it had gone beyond its remit as a registered charity and tried to influence a number of planning decisions.”

“When [developer Bruce] Ratner first unveiled the Atlantic Yards project in 2003, it was to be a complex on a virtually Vatican scale … all of it designed by Gehry. Six years later, we’re left with a possible basketball court in a prairie of blight.”

Thomas Campbell: “If I’m bringing a slight shift of focus at this moment it’s in two respects. The first is that…we’ve been mounting around 30-35 exhibitions a year, putting huge creativity and resources into that side of our operations…I want to bring more of that back to our own collections.”

The top reason was either “interest in the artists” or “to see the artworks in the original.” More interesting were the second-most-frequent responses: At the modern art museum, patrons listed “the pleasure they feel during their visit,” while at the ancient art museum, they chose “the desire for cultural enrichment.”