Category: visual

“Claude Monet’s masterpiece Nympheas has been sold at auction for £18.5m at Sotheby’s in London. The painting, from Monet’s water lilies series, is part of the auction house’s impressionist and modern art sale.”

“It’s nearly summer, and the great chandelier that has hung in the Academy of Music for a century and a half is going on a nice, long trip – a cure, really – to the south of France.” The point of its restoration “is to get the chandelier as close as possible to its original appearance without reinstalling the 240 gas jets that were its original source of light. It is part of a larger, $1.2 million project to relight the Academy’s ornate architectural details, such as the Mozart medallion over the stage and the mural in the dome.”

“To archaeologists, knowing that a virtually unexplored land of mystery is soon to be flooded has the same effect as Samuel Johnson ascribed to one facing the gallows in the morning. It concentrates the mind. Over the last few years, archaeological teams from Britain, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sudan and the United States have raced to dig at sites that will soon be underwater. The teams were surprised to find hundreds of settlement ruins, cemeteries and examples of rock art that had never been studied.”

Peter Schjeldahl writes that this year’s Venice Biennale is a show of ideas. “By insisting on contemplative absorption and civic conscience, Storr is a bit of a schoolmarm, demanding dignity of irresponsible pupils. But he marshals a lot of artistic talent to his side–and, for clarity and rhythm of presentation, his shows constitute by a long shot the most elegant of the several Biennales I’ve seen. I think the event will be remembered as a cautionary service, conservative in spirit and progressive in principle, to a frenetic time.”

Richard Dormant thinks this year’s Documenta is the worst yet. “Though Documenta 12 has more than 500 works, so much of what is on view is second-rate, chosen for who knows what reason and displayed so eccentrically that, just as in the Royal Academy’s summer exhibition, it is easy to overlook the few really good things in it.”

John Tusa, retiring from leading the Barbican Center, has been named director of the Victoria & Albert Museum. “Tusa, 71, was named today by Prime Minister Tony Blair, though he has criticized the Blair government’s arts policy, and currently chairs an independent arts task force for the opposition Conservatives. He previously served as managing director of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s World Service.”

“Power of Art succeeds not because of the power of the chosen masterpieces but because Simon Schama masterfully weaves engaging mysteries around each artwork. And he walks and talks viewers through it all in a “History Boys” style that is so chatty and disarming that even the flintiest museumphobe wants to stick around to find out what happened next.”

“With so much flickering newsreel on show, the biennale as a whole feels as preachy as an Islamic bookstore. It’s short on wow factor, and heavy on words. You’ll have gathered by now that what is missing from this biennale is some art by grown-ups: the signature pieces, the leaps of invention. They exist, but they have to be sniffed out.”

Sarah Milroy writes that “most of us who attended the [Venice] Biennale’s three press days last week agreed that this is the best Biennale we had seen in years… Many of the leading nations have made their best curatorial picks in a long time,” and director Robert Storr “is indisputably one of the great curators working today, making exhibitions that display both a high degree of aesthetic discrimination, a depth of historical understanding and an impeccable sense of timing.”

“Few glimpses are left of [the Venice Biennale’s] imperial past, where it was still believed that culture might be stamped with a national identity – or vice versa. Confronting nationalism now means a walk across the lawn fronting the bone-dry white façade of the Brazilian pavilion, only to be confronted by an impossibly skinny Japanese transvestite teetering around on elevator shoes posing for Egyptian tourists.”