Category: visual

Tate Modern’s Crack

There’s a 500-foot crack in the concrete floor of Tate Modern. “I’m with an architect and a couple of builders, and we are examining the crack from a wide variety of angles and sticking our fingers inside and giving it a damn good poke and generally trying very hard indeed to work a few things out. The first is: how on earth did it get here? The second is: could it be dangerous? This being the Tate, we also feel obliged, finally, to consider the possibility that it might be art.”

Soviet Modernism Finds A Powerful Ally

Russian billionaire politician Sergey Gordeev, 34, is making a name for himself in the art world with his acquisition and preservation of Soviet-era architecture. “With his fingers in so many pies, it can seem as though Mr. Gordeev’s hands hold the fate of one of the greatest legacies of 20th-century Modernism. And while the preservationists who once feared him now fervently praise him, they privately admit to some disquiet.”

Art Prices As Distraction

Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward museum says the soaring art market is a distraction. “All the attention of it — how much money is paid for a Peter Doig or a Damien Hirst — distracts us from thinking about what the work is about. It’s amazing that these contemporary artworks are selling for as much money as they do, but I don’t think it necessarily helps anybody appreciate what’s interesting about contemporary art.”

What’s Needed: An “Un-Turner” Prize

Some of Britain’s best contemporary artists have never even been shortlisted for the Turner Prize. “There is every possibility that an un-Turner prize, for which the only qualification for candidates would be that they had never been shortlisted, would be more interesting and more fun, and heaven knows it could easily be worth more money, than the Turner prize itself. There have been philistine anti-Turner prizes in the past; what we need is something at least as sophisticated and as discriminating as the Turner prize itself.”