Category: visual

London’s Victoria & Albert Museum is 150 years old this week. Antony Gormley says that it remains a shining example of what a museum should be: “a great and varied building with internal and external spaces, full of extraordinary objects that talk to us and each other, contextualised within the wider institutions of science and art, both university and museum, in a way that encourages curiosity, scholarship – and the creativity in all of us.”

“A major retrospective is to be held at Tate Modern of the work of 95-year-old Louise Bourgeois… Bourgeois was present during the birth pangs of modern art (she knew Marcel Duchamp personally) and has seen every avant-garde movement of the 20th century unfold. Her works can be seen as a reaction to movements such as surrealism, minimalism and abstract expressionism.”

“One of Damien Hirst’s trademark medicine cabinets has sold at auction for £9.65m ($19.28m,) breaking the European record for work by a living artist. A private bidder paid almost three times the estimate at Sotheby’s for Lullaby Spring, which contains 6,136 individually painted pills.”

Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House, “which opens to the public Saturday as a National Trust for Historic Preservation site, is austere, but not threatening. It is one of the great monuments of modernism in America, by one of this country’s longest-lived and most influential architects… But the evidence of daily life has not been scrubbed from the house,” and Philip Kennicott says that makes the structure all the more fascinating.

Holland Cotter says that while the Documenta festival may not always be coherent or objectively “good,” it never fails to be intriguing. “The show sustains its reputation for being an idiosyncratic, concept-driven affair. You go to glamorous, sun-splashed Venice to party, gaze and graze; you come to gray, pleasureless Kassel to think.”

“Four female artists swept the board last night in the inaugural awards established by John Lowrie Morrison, the artist known as Jolomo, to encourage traditional painting. Anna King, a 23-year-old painter based in the Borders, received top prize and a cheque for £20,000 for a portfolio of work described as the ‘anti-Turner Prize.’ Fellow artists Helen Glassford, Rebecca Firth and Ingrid Fraser also won prizes in the Jolomo Lloyds TSB Scotland Awards.

“A 59-year-old has won the first BP Portrait Award open to artists of any age. Paul Emsley, from Bradford on Avon, in Wiltshire, [England] takes the £25,000 prize for an oil painting of a 67-year-old artist who lives in his town.” The contest was previously open only to artists under 40.

Britain’s leading museum directors have issued a statement of strong support for the government program that allowed them to drop all admission charges several years back. “The move comes after the shadow culture secretary, Hugo Swire, told a newspaper that museums should be allowed more freedom in the way they run themselves, including the freedom to charge for entrance if they wish.”

What can museums do about the fact that record auction sales are pricing them out of the high-end art market? “For UK museums with decreasing spending power, this inexorable rise in the global art market is a desperate, ongoing problem… One of the most important potential changes that could come from government is the introduction of tax incentives that would create a better culture of giving in the UK – something that galleries and organisations such as the Art Fund have long campaigned for.”

Jonathan Jones likes what he sees from the British Museum’s revamped prehistoric galleries. “There is no denying the beauty of prehistoric artefacts. You can disguise it, though, by displaying hundreds of arrowheads in cases that don’t seem to have been dusted since the 1950s – which is why this new set of modern and gracious galleries comes as a joy. The real test of the dynamic new British Museum is how well it does its basic job of displaying the ancient past. Very well, is the answer from looking at this new suite. It’s simple and smart, so as you walk along, you perceive changing time as a succession of colours.”