Category: visual

“Tintoretto’s enormous ‘The Dreams of Men,’ one of the stars of the Detroit Institute of Art’s permanent collection, was reinstalled last month in a specially designed octagonal ceiling perch 24 feet above the ground. The painting — an oil on canvas measuring more than 12 feet long and 7 feet wide and depicting gods and mythological figures — was painted for the bedroom ceiling of a well-to-do Venetian merchant around 1550. More than 450 years later, the DIA has returned the work to its original ceiling orientation, offering Detroiters an exhilarating perspective that no other museum in the United States can match.”

Three new buildings headquartering broadcasting concerns are opening this week, and all three were designed by the same innovative architecture firm. “Each of these media-themed clients was looking for a strong new physical identity,” and each now has a building with striking physical attributes tied directly to the business of broadcasting.

A new collection of photos on display at the Holocaust Museum amounts to “a scrapbook of sorts of the lives of Auschwitz’s senior SS officers that was maintained by Karl Höcker, the adjutant to the camp commandant. Rather than showing the men performing their death camp duties, the photos depicted, among other things, a horde of SS men singing cheerily to the accompaniment of an accordionist, Höcker lighting the camp’s Christmas tree, a cadre of young SS women frolicking and officers relaxing, some with tunics shed, for a smoking break. The photos provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos, the so-called Auschwitz Album.”

“Many great buildings have always been a kind of work in progress. The idea that ‘old’ buildings, that is those dating from before the modern movement, or the 1960s, were always better made than new ones, is simply not true.”

Ken Johnson became the Globe’s art critic last September. He says: “I hope no one will interpret my departure as a critique of Boston, the Boston art world, or the Boston Globe. I’m moving back to New York, and I’m returning to writing art criticism for the New York Times as one of its principal freelance critics.”

The newly expanded Philadelphia Museum of Art “now offers something grand that the public will see only indirectly – through the benefits conferred on thousands of works of art” in its “vastly enlarged conservation facilities for paintings, works on paper, photographs, and costumes and textiles. For the museum’s paper and textile conservators, who have previously labored in quarters that charitably could be called cramped, the opening means they will finally have space to work on quilts and screens, large drawings and gowns, throws and scrolls.”

“On Monday President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, who is increasingly faulted, even by his own government, for usurping the responsibilities of his top ministers, stepped into the role of culture minister. At a low-key ceremony he inaugurated La Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, (the City of Architecture and Heritage) in Paris, which reopened after a $114 million, decade-long makeover. … With three galleries and 86,000 square feet of space, the City of Architecture and Heritage bills itself as the largest architectural museum in the world.”

Boston public broadcaster WGBH has a new home. “This is the first serious example in Boston of a kind of architecture we’re beginning to see elsewhere, in Times Square, for example, in which the architectural façade of a building is no longer made of the traditional brick, stone, steel or glass but is, instead, an ever-changing, programmable image. Call it digital architecture. Architecture and media become one… That nightmare, though, is in the future, and for now, here at WGBH, digital architecture looks pretty good.”

Turmoil at the Smithsonian in the past year doesn’t seem to have slowed fundraising. Officials report that the troubled institution is on track to raise $140 million this year, up from $131 million in 2006.

Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is working on raising money for a major expansion. “The gift from the Boston financial services firm brings the MFA’s fund-raising total to $415 million, $85 million away from its goal. The money will fund a massive expansion project set to be completed in 2010.”