Category: visual

“French President Nicolas Sarkozy said France would benefit from more ‘audacious’ designs at the opening of a new $111-million museum dedicated to French architecture, located in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower in Paris.”

Are blockbuster exhibitions of great art worth it? “When works of art are transported, they are easier to steal. And a surprising number are stolen en route from one museum to another. Serious damage during transport is much more frequent than museums admit. The very popularity of blockbuster shows creates one critical disadvantage: it makes it almost impossible to appreciate the art itself.”

“Since Thomas Krens took over in 1988, the air around art at the Guggenheim has been distorted and toxic. Yet since he left his directorship in 2005 to run the Guggenheim Foundation, which oversees all five museums (New York, Venice, Berlin, Bilbao, Las Vegas), the institution has shown auspicious signs of actually putting his tenure behind it. But something rotten is brewing. Krens has been up to his corrosive old tricks again.”

Yale University and Peru have signed a preliminary agreement “that would return title to Peru of more than 350 artifacts — ceramics and metal and stone objects — that are considered to be of museum quality and several thousand fragments, bones and other objects considered to be primarily of interest to researchers. The agreement, which establishes an extensive collaborative relationship between Yale and Peru, provides for an international traveling exhibition.”

“There are 8,000 warriors in the Terracotta Army and yet no two figures are alike, and it is not just a matter of superficial detail. No scarf or moustache is exactly alike, and every pair of shoes is slightly different. But what is far more astonishing is that every warrior is his own man: that every man stands out from the next. Surely the terracotta soldiers are in some sense actual portraits?”

The $6 billion-plus global art market has more than doubled in four years, thanks to the growing number of wealthy patrons and an influx of new collectors from Russia and Asia. Now, children are emerging as one more niche. Collectors such as Bil Ehrlich, a New York real-estate developer, and Peter Brant, a Los Angeles-based film producer and magazine publisher, pay for their kids to collect works from name-brand artists.

So you think Ansel Adams is a nature photographer? Think again, writes Blake Gopnik. “Adams’s photos aren’t just about landscape. They’re about the particular confrontation between technology and landscape that made those photos possible. The images of the Sierra Nevada are as much about getting easy access to those mountains — even with dozens of pounds of large-format camera equipment — as about the mountains themselves.”

The battle that erupted months ago between the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMoCA) and Swiss artist Christoph Büchel over whether Büchel’s planned installation should open as scheduled (the artist wanted it canceled, claiming that the museum was trying to get the exhibit on the cheap) has become a cautionary tale for museums across the country. “The meltdown at Mass MOCA is sad for all concerned, yet is also a reflection of the changes wrought since the late 1960s, as installation art evolved from renegade form into an institutional staple of ever-bigger galleries and museums.”

Several curators have left the museum world for the commercial sector. There was a time this would have provoked debate. “There is a blurring of what used to be clear boundaries between the museum and the trade. What has been surprising with Lisa Dennison is that the museum world is saying ‘how interesting’, not that it traduces the values of the museum.”

The British Museum has smashed ticket sales records with an exhibition of China’s terra cotta warriors. “By 10 AM the museum had sold 150,403 tickets, breaking all previous records for advance sales. Organisers are frantically calculating how they can extend opening hours until April, to admit a total now expected to reach half a million.”