Category: visual

“The national museums have put forward three options if cuts are imposed on the scale intended. They can reintroduce admission charges; they can stop lending items and exhibits to the rest of the country; or they can shut departments, buildings and entire institutions. The removal of entry charges five years ago resulted in 85 million extra museum visitors and is being trumpeted as one of New Labour’s triumphs. There is no way the government will allow that egalitarian policy to be reversed.”

Costas Kondylis has had a major career as an architect in New York. He “has established a 185-member office, completed 75 buildings in New York and currently has 15 more in the works. If the architecture profession hasn’t exalted him as much as it has some others, the city’s developers keep hiring him. Again and again and again.”

After some bleak reviews of Daniel Libeskind’s new Denver Art Museum, more recent assessments have been more upbeat. “It is impossible, of course, to know how posterity will ultimately judge this building or what influence today’s reviews will have. But what is clear is that some of the early attacks on the building were extreme and a more fair and balanced assessment is coalescing.”

“It’s another sign of the acceleration of the contemporary art market: New works, even in the six-figure range, are selling by digital image alone.”

The International Council of Museums says that Afghanistan is being systematically looted of its artifacts. “Ancient sites and monuments, ranging from the Old Stone Age to the 20th century, are being attacked and systematically looted,” said the organization, based in Paris.

New York’s Seventh Regiment Armory, which is used to stage several prominent art fairs, changed hands in mid-December, and this week, those who are used to staging events at the venue got the news they had been expecting: rents are going up. Way up. By this fall, the cost of renting the Armory for an art show will have tripled.

Denver’s recently completed contemporary art museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, has been causing quite a stir in the city, and some observers see it as an entirely new way to look at art and the space that surrounds it. But others have wondered whether Libeskind’s design overwhelms the art it’s supposed to be highlighting. Marilynne Mason writes that “the controversy surrounding the Hamilton seems misplaced. So much of modern and contemporary art defies the eye and preconceived notions about beauty and truth, and demands that the viewer learn to question, think, and see anew. And so does this new building.”

Amsterdam’s world-famous Rijksmuseum, which is undergoing a major restoration, will not reopen until 2010, two years later than originally planned. “Delays had arisen due to the need for extra building permits after some initial designs had been modified… During the renovation, works by Rembrandt and other Dutch masters such as Frans Hals and Vermeer have remained on view in a side wing.”

The city of Leipzig, Germany might seem an unlikely hot spot for the art world. It’s been mired in economic depression for years, a victim of the malaise that settled over so much of the former East Germany after reunification. But in recent years, “the new Leipzig School has coalesced into what Joachim Pissarro of the Museum of Modern Art described… as ‘suddenly the hottest thing on earth.'”

“The mysterious builders of Stonehenge have finally been tracked to their doors. Archaeologists yesterday announced that they had found the largest concentration of prehistoric hut sites ever discovered in Britain, at Durrington Walls, two miles from the stone circle.”