Category: visual

You can’t please everyone, but with the much-ballyhooed rollout of its official logo for the 2012 Games, London’s Olympic officials appear to have pleased absolutely no one. The logo, which looks a bit like a game of Tetris gone horribly awry, inspired thousands of Britons to sign online petitions demanding its replacement, and an animated version apparently caused at least ten epileptic seizures before it was shut down.

Cuban-born artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres will (posthumously) represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, which begins Sunday, and that fact would probably have come as a great surprise to him. Gonzalez-Torres “had a complicated but unabashed love of America and the ideals it represented. His work was often a way to express his bitter disappointment when he felt that the country was failing those ideals.”

The director of Washington, D.C.’s Phillips Collection has announced that he will step down from the post in 2008. Jay Gates has been on the job for nearly a decade, and presided over a major reinvigoration and expansion of the collection and its mission.

“The National Geographic Society has struck a $1 million deal with the Afghan government to bring a rare cache of gold artifacts to the United States in a traveling exhibition. But some cultural experts who have followed the negotiations are questioning whether Afghanistan is being properly compensated.”

“Art does not follow the calendar’s dividing lines. Hirst has created an object that has nothing to do with the 20th century, that owes as little to Marcel Duchamp as it does to Picasso, that has nothing to do with the Holocaust or 1917 or any of the 20th century’s memories … a work of art, in fact, that could have been created in any century but that one. Art has struggled to escape the 20th century because its first half was a great aesthetic period that cast a long shadow. Hirst, though, has broken through – for the second time.

Greek artists and media are protesting government raid and shutdown of an art exhibit. “Featuring work by more than 70 artists and organized under the auspices of the Greek Cultural Ministry, the 13th edition of the Art Athina exhibit included an installation by artist Eva Stefani in which viewers could peer through a peephole and see footage of Greek pornography from the 1960s and 1970s, set to a soundtrack that includes the Greek national anthem.”

“A total of 10 items valued at about £10,000 – nine of them by Banksy – were stolen on 20 and 24 May. Sussex Police said it appeared the Artrepublic gallery, in Bond Street, Brighton, had been ‘purposely targeted for the Banksy works’.”

“The Philadelphia Museum of Art is hiking admission across all categories by an average of 25 percent. … The new fees mean that since 1997 regular adult admission has doubled; for seniors in the past decade it has tripled. At the same time, the museum has expanded free admission for children and extended the pay-what-you-wish policy….”

“Art Basel Director Samuel Keller, who steps down this year as head of the world’s biggest contemporary fair, has some advice for his successor. ‘Change continuously with the art world,’ Keller, 41, said in a telephone interview from the Swiss city. ‘Listen to the galleries who have what it takes to make an art fair.'”

“The controversial white block of a building is still shrouded in dark netting. The hard-hatted men perched on the surrounding scaffolding won’t wrap up their work until the middle of next year. But behind the scrim, the ‘lollipop’ building at 2 Columbus Circle is steadily changing into a new home for the Museum of Arts and Design.”