Category: visual

“Museums, both private and public, exist in abundance in Asia. But, for the most part, the idea of what a museum is, what it is for – this is a recent construct… The allocation of government resources for building major cultural facilities represents a new trend where art museums are seen as a necessary status symbol of a truly ‘world class’ city.” Lost in the neverending quest for status may be the value of art itself.

“Our golden age of museum popularity will be looked on with shame and disgust by a future robbed of its inheritance. If museums are anything, they are attempts to preserve what is worth preserving. Today’s vogue for reinventing the museum, questioning its traditional role as a ‘collection’, merging the curator and the artist, risks destroying the ark.”

“Charles Saatchi’s popular internet gallery Your Gallery has taken a step into international student culture. Last week’s launch of Stuart… has been seized upon by young student artists. Hits per day have risen to two and half million a day. About 500 art students have taken advantage of the opportunity to show an unlimited amount of work for free.”

The Chicago Tribune is asking its critics to write about a review they wish they could have back – an instance in which their immediate reaction, expressed on deadline, came to seem incorrect with the passage of time. For architecture critic Blair Kamin, a pasting of legendary architect Rem Koolhaas sprang immediately to mind. “As I’ve gone through the building over the last three years… I’ve been gripped by tinges of regret — not so much that my criticisms were wrong, but that I blew them out of proportion.”

Art critic Alan Artner goes all the way back to his earliest days at the Tribune for his mea culpa. “When, in 1973, I began writing regularly about visual art for this newspaper, the local crossbreeding of Surrealism and Pop Art known as Imagism was being promoted as the only game in town. [As] a native Chicagoan I resented that any one thing should have been exalted to the exclusion of nearly everything else… But the language in which I wrote about my recoil from Imagism was wrong because it was vehement. And that vehemence came from the mistake of reacting as much to the environment Imagism had caused as to the work itself.”

“Internationalism now rivals youth culture in the art world’s hot pursuit of the never-before-seen,” and the result is a newly active job description for those who make their living curating new shows. “The downside, some curators say, is the perpetual demand for new introductions, which tends to encourage a pell-mell rush to judgment in unfamiliar areas.”

Cecil Balmond’s name probably doesn’t ring a bell, even amongst architecture buffs. But Balmond’s career has been spent in the service of the world’s great architects, finding ways to translate the most unlikely designs into real-world buildings that won’t collapse under their own creativity. “As architects push the limits of their formal language, Mr. Balmond’s engineering genius has been crucial to the emergence of a new aesthetic of shifting asymmetrical structures that mock conventional notions of stability. Beyond making their projects buildable, his solutions spur such architects to explore forms they might not have considered before.”

“The Museo Carlo Bilotti is Rome’s newest cultural gem, with extraordinary art housed in a fastidiously restored 16th-century marble palazzo smack in the middle of Villa Borghese. But wait. Carlo Bilotti? A Medici? A Borghese? Guess again: Mr. Bilotti, who died last week at 72, was a loquacious retired Italian-American perfume executive from Palm Beach.”

London may be one of the world’s global art centers, but new evidence suggests that UK galleries are falling far behind the rest of the world in the acquisition of new works of art. “Our major museums are sliding at a terrifying rate down the international league table while the incentives to encourage private giving are insufficient.”

A Cranach masterpiece on display at London’s National Gallery was apparently seized by the Nazis and then taken from postwar Germany by an American journalist, according to sources at the gallery. “The discovery that the picture was spoliated was only recently made and the gallery is now trying to identify the pre-war owner of the painting… The fact that the painting has not been claimed may well mean that the entire family was killed during the war.”