Category: visual

The design for New York City’s $15.5 million Frederick Douglass Circle includes “a huge quilt in granite, an array of squares, a symbol in each, supposedly part of a secret code sewn into family quilts and used along the Underground Railroad to aid slaves. Two plaques would explain this. The only problem: According to many prominent historians, the secret code … never existed.”

So the Louvre is collecting English art. “Forgive me for not waving the union flag and tricolour side by side in gratitude and joy, but the French national collection of world art is discovering Britain several years, if not decades, after everyone else”… Still, “our own national collection is more isolated than ever in its refusal to vaunt the genius of British artists in its permanent galleries.”

The Seattle Art Museum is expanding in high-profile ways. The just-p[ened Olympic Sculpture Park is getting raves, but Jim Russell’s first look at the museum’s new expandion of its main building shows something less interesting…

“The Paris landmark attracted approximately 8.3 million visitors in 2006, up from the 7.5 million it saw in 2005, the museum said in a statement on Sunday. The attendance of both French citizens and foreigners has increased steadily over the past few years, Louvre officials said.”

“Why is the Louvre buying so much British art? The answer is that the museum is preparing to open a permanent gallery dedicated to British art in the spring of 2008, for which conversion work is under way. The 300 sq m gallery will display 70 pictures at a time, on an upper floor with natural light.”

Last week it was announced that LA’s Hammer Museum “would divide the Hammer art collection in two. Of 195 works, 103 will remain with the museum. The other 92 will be turned over to the Armand Hammer Foundation, from whence they all came.” So maybe there’s an opportunity lurking to aid the LA County Museum of Art?

Architect Frank Gehry is designing another concert hall, this time in Miami, to house the New World Symphony, which bills itself as America’s orchestral training academy. But “in contrast to Gehry’s bravura landmarks such as the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, you won’t be able to take in the essential idea at a distance. This building won’t swoop, nor will it curve, bow, bend or dance. It is subtle rather than obvious — a building that requires participation, which is really the whole point.”

The rise of digital art has wrought many changes in the art world, but one of the biggest challenges for those who use computers to create their art may be avoiding technological obsolescence. “Is this work – perfectly preserved in binary code – doomed because it will be superseded by future hardware and software?” And when art is designed to be fluid, how do you even define what constitutes the art, anyway?

Seattle’s new Rem Koolhaas-designed central library has been winning rave reviews from architecture buffs since it opened in 2005. But artistic merit and functionality are two different things, so it’s worth noting that the library has also been a huge success with those who actually use it. “It is casual enough that kids and teenagers are showing up in unprecedented numbers but so are those intent on serious study.”

“People on the Bay Area art scene still fret about the larger world’s failure to recognize San Francisco as a center of cultural influence,” and a new exhibit frames the defensiveness as part of a larger art struggle between two of America’s cultural hubs. “It tries to sketch the tensions between New York and San Francisco sensibilities during the years when American art consolidated its supremacy amid the transnational ruins of World War II.”