Category: visual

Greece is close to completing its new Acropolis museum. “After more than 30 years of preparation, procrastination and acrimonious debate, the building, which once seemed like a far-fetched dream, a last resort of the romantically inclined, is finally nearing completion.”

Ten years after planning began, Pittsburgh has broken ground on the August Wilson Center for African American Culture in the city’s downtown district. “Actual construction begins next month and the center is supposed to open in early 2008… The center will contain a cafe, 500-seat theater, 4,000-square-foot exhibition space and additional education spaces.”

A new generation of museums in South Africa not only tells the past, but tries to influence the future. “We want these museums to have a deep impact: to move people intensely, to inspire them to go out and build a better future. We want people to come out feeling compelled to work for a better society.”

Lee Rosenbaum says that the revelation that Pennsylvania lawmakers may have allocated money to move the Barnes collection to Philadelphia may be disappointing, but that it doesn’t change the basic reality of the situation. “With all the fundraising and planning that have already gone into the Philly Barnes, It may be too late to effectuate any change in course… But big-money collectors ought to be sympathetic to the concept of honoring the memory and intentions of one of their own.”

The city of San Francisco is a major art collector, but you’d never know it by the way many of the pieces in the collection get treated. ” San Francisco owns more than 3,000 pieces of art, acquired mainly through commissions and gifts and valued at about $30 million. But decades of poor record keeping and other factors have landed work by noted artists” in a dirty, wet basement room of a city hospital.

“Another Place, the sculptor Antony Gormley’s collection of 100 cast iron naked men installed on a Merseyside beach, will have to head for another city. Though they have attracted more than 600,000 visitors, and a likely government grant of £1m, councillors in Sefton have decided the figures need to be removed.”

“Concordia University has recovered what it hopes will be the first of many paintings that belonged to a prominent Jewish art collector who fled Germany and moved to Canada.”

Frank Gehry has signed on to design an expansion for the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It will be entirely underground. “There is a kind of modesty thing. Most of us, we don’t set out to do the Bilbao effect, as it’s being called. It’d be a real challenge to do something that’s virtually hidden, that could become spectacular.”

Plans for a new home for New York City Opera are done, even though the company probably won’t get a chance to use them. Too bad, writes James Russell. “City Opera says it’s still discussing a new home, but the task looks ever more formidable. The de Portzamparc effort makes it all too clear just what New York City is missing, and why the self-proclaimed world capital of culture has so much trouble nurturing it.”

Denverites hoped that the Denver Art Museum’s new Libeskind expansion would become a national landmark. But the reviews haven’t been positive in the nationa press. “The bad buzz as a place to show art certainly isn’t going to help. The negative or even middling reviews work against the Bilbao-effect phenomenon that you get, at least potentially, from a rave.”