Category: visual

A landmark exhibit of the work of artist Simon Njami is aiming to change global perceptions of African life and culture, a mission the artist has embraced throughout his career. Born in Europe, Njami sees the world’s affection for traditional African art as an incomplete interest in the subject. “Art and artists can tell their own stories – and in those stories is truth about what it is to be African. Part of the truth, at least.”

“Countries from the US to Kazakhstan are in a building frenzy. They are all eclipsed, however, by the greatest building site of all: China, whose appetite is so insatiable that it is gobbling up half the world’s concrete and still has room for a third of its steel for pudding. This is a boom time for architecture. Dubai, Beijing, Shanghai and Moscow are staking their claim to a place on the architectural stage, with no absurdity too extreme.”

The Gates Foundation is building a new headquarters in Seattle, and it will have a museum. “The foundation, the largest in the world with $33.4 billion in assets, has given museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates the task of creating a 15,000-square-foot center that explains the nonprofit’s work in global health, development and education.”

Neigbors of the Barnes Collection had been silent. Indeed, they had complained for years about traffic around the Barnes. But now, as the art collection appears headed to Philadelphia, loal officials have a change of heart. “No one in the suburban coalition seems quite sure what has brought the about-face. It may be a change of elected officials in some of the government offices. It may be that the hot embers of the old fights have cooled. It may be that, by lagging in its political efforts to gain ownership of a new site in Philadelphia, the Barnes itself has left open the door for suburban second thoughts.”

Boston’s “surge in young dealers echoes a national trend, supported by a white-hot market for contemporary art in which prices are soaring, youth often equals cachet, and international art fairs and the Internet are turning what has largely been a storefront business into a global one. … This isn’t the first time young dealers have opened commercial galleries, but this time the market appears to be supporting them — and the kind of emerging artists many of them present.”

Ralph Appelbaum of museum design firm Ralph Appelbaum Associates talks about creating a 15,000-square-foot center in Seattle that will explain the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the public. “The way to get people emotionally engaged in information is to build a series of encounters that give them the tools to go to the next level — very much like the Holocaust Museum. … Much of the experience is making the case for action.”

“Second Life is loosely and shambolically generating a new type of architecture. Who knows what that might mean for SL’s current jump-cut geography? In the future, perhaps SL’s overlords will start to clean up its shantytown chaos, repossessing homes and driving giant boulevards through it, as Haussmann did with Paris. Perhaps it will end up looking nothing like our own world; perhaps they’ll converge in ways we can’t yet imagine. It is a world in its infancy, unavoidably complex, useful, unpredictable and legitimate, with countless advantages over the real one.”

“There are now so many biennials that art is suffering from overexposure, and we do curators and artists a disservice by seeing these shows only at the openings. More than that, though, I found that each of the three super-shows offers a snapshot of the strategies and styles of those professionals who have been called ‘the men in black.’ I’m talking, of course, about the curators.”

“London’s auctions of old-master pictures, from Raphael to Turner, rose 47 percent at Sotheby’s and Christie’s last week, helped by an influx of new buyers. Many high-priced works failed to sell. The results showed that while the auction houses have been successful in drawing new buyers from the U.S. to Russia, they overestimated the appeal of many earlier works.”