Category: visual

The Smithsonian Institution’s new secretary, Wayne Clough, “took the helm in the wake of a raging controversy. His predecessor, Lawrence M. Small, resigned in March 2007 amid charges of flagrant spending and irresponsible management. Then came the most serious economic downturn since the Great Depression. But Clough (pronounced cluff) seems to have found a comfort zone at the 163-year-old institution.”

“Art Moscow, one of Russia’s biggest contemporary-art fairs, has been postponed to September to tap a crowd headed for a larger exhibition, as falling oil prices and squeezed credit quell art purchases among the nation’s rich.” The director of the company that puts on Art Moscow, which was to have opened May 14, put it this way: “By September, everyone will have gotten used to the new reality of the crisis.”

The man who designed Brazil’s once-futuristic capital (“widely considered an architectural masterwork and an unparalleled urban catastrophe”) is still working at age 101, so he was invited to design a monument for the city’s 50th anniversary in 2010. But when he revealed his plan for a new plaza, architects and preservations cried that Niemeyer’s new design just wouldn’t fit with Niemeyer’s old design.

“The look remains instantly recognisable and rather friendly. But its energy, commitment and optimism have become frankly unbelievable. Those blocky graphics and lettering! Those zooming diagonals! Those slicing sheets of pure colour! It’s a style that comes with exclamation marks, and for us that means it comes with irony. Its name was Constructivism. Can we take it seriously at all?”

“With all the ironies crushing down on it, it’s amazing this building is still standing. Opening shortly after a devastating conflict, the Peres Peace House is a venue for propagating peace and improving ties between Israel and its neighbours. Furthermore, this smart new piece of architecture is named after Shimon Peres…. While the Peres Centre arranges for the treatment of injured Gaza children in Israeli hospitals, Peres publicly defends the military attacks that put them there.”

“A jury should clear the creator of an inflatable artwork that blew away killing two people, because the prosecution had not offered enough evidence to convict him of manslaughter, a court heard today. Dreamspace artist Maurice Agis, 77, could not have predicted the conditions that saw his 164ft by 164ft (50m by 50m) PVC creation flip into the air after a gust of wind lifted it from the ground, his barrister told Newcastle Crown Court.”

“The Palace Museum in Beijing has agreed to lend works of art to the National Palace Museum in Taipei for an exhibition next autumn, temporarily bringing together a small part of China’s imperial collection for the first time in 60 years, both museums said on Monday.”

“Clearly there is a need for an international committee to create a new and definitive Goya catalogue raisonné, a lengthy and complex project on the order of that organized for two other great and immensely prolific painters, Rembrandt and Rubens. Until then, the attribution of the ‘Colossus’ to anyone other than Goya remains unproved and highly questionable.”

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s sensitive and spectacular renovation of Alice Tully Hall “triumphs because at every juncture, it avoids architectural wowmanship and directs attention to the artistic labor going on inside. … It will take some time and many concerts to be sure, but I suspect that Alice Tully Hall has become what it should have been all along: the finest home for chamber music in New York.”

“Like the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, who included a Louis Vuitton boutique in his Los Angeles retrospective, Fairey reverses a revolution achieved by Warhol, along with Roy Lichtenstein. He embraces a trend in what the critic Dave Hickey has called ‘pop masquerading as art, as opposed to art masquerading as pop.'”