Category: visual

“Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around New York have frequently landed him in trouble with the authorities, spent the last five months building … a rough replica of what is believed to have been America’s first submarine…. He wanted to float north in the Buttermilk Channel to stage an incursion against the Queen Mary 2, which had just docked in Red Hook, the mission objective mostly just to get close enough to the ship to videotape himself against its immensity for a coming gallery show.” The New York City police had other ideas….

“As Demetrios, a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy belonging to the Brooklyn Museum, lay on the table of the ’64-slice’ CT scanner, a cluster of art curators, conservators and medical specialists looked on, riveted by the macabre spectacle. While mummies have been subjected to CT scans for more than two decades, it was a first for the museum…. The goal was to gain insights into who Demetrios was, how he died and what his mummified remains might tell them about Egyptian funerary practices.”

Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza seldom builds outside Europe and “has spent his career quietly working on the fringes of the international architecture scene. … Yet over the last five decades Mr. Siza, now 74, has steadily assembled a body of work that ranks him among the greatest architects of his generation, and his creative voice has never seemed more relevant than now.”

“As a city volunteer rolled dark green paint over a bright jumble of scrawlings and imagery on a fence at Warm Water Cove Park on Saturday, Paul Barron stood alongside holding a yellow sign with an ornately lettered message: ‘Celebrate Graffiti!’ ‘Painting over artwork isn’t gonna prevent any crime,’ Barron, who described himself as a professional muralist and graffiti artist, told reporters who had come to witness a culture clash on a balmy morning at San Francisco’s southern waterfront. ‘They’re taking away our voice … killing the only pure form of art.'”

“Leaders of one-artist museums across the country — including the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., the Isamu Noguchi Museum in New York and the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont. — spend their days dreaming up ways to promote the legacies of individual artists. Instead of creating a shrine or a morgue, directors of these museums try to position the artist as the center of a universe that reaches out to scholars, artists and the public.” And the number of such museums has grown in the U.S. in recent years.

“Italy will drop civil suits against former J. Paul Getty Museum antiquities curator Marion True after the Los Angeles museum agreed yesterday to return 40 works Italy says were looted, Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli said today. True still faces criminal charges.”

The Baghdad Museum is unblocking its doors again and allowing staff in. “Shortly before antiquities head Donny George went into exile last August, he had all the entrances to the building blocked, because of the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. Dr George admitted that this could have created environmental problems, but he felt it was too dangerous to protect the museum with just locked doors.”

Christopher Knight says that the Getty’s deal with the Italian government could actually benefit the museum in the long run. As part of the settlement under which the Getty agreed to return 40 works of art to Italy, “Italy announced it would loan important works of ancient art to the beautifully refurbished Getty Villa, overlooking the Pacific Ocean at the edge of Malibu. Collection sharing among art museums is an idea whose appeal has been growing. Agreements like this will only accelerate the interest.”

Several big name artists are setting up their own galleries in London. “Damien Hirst has reportedly bought a series of railway arches in Vauxhall in which he wishes to open a gallery and restaurant, rumoured to be opening next year. Jake Chapman is also said to be negotiating a lease for his own permanent gallery site. Already up and running is Wolfgang Tillmans, who opened the exhibition space Between Bridges in east London last year.”

“German cultural institutions have issued a catalogue detailing thousands of objects of art that disappeared from Berlin at the end of the second world war, in the hope of pricking the conscience of governments to return them.”