Category: visual

“When you launch yourself from the top of one of Carsten Höller’s slides in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall – the largest is 56 metres long and with a stomach-churning 27-metre drop – you leave a lot behind you. Principally, your dignity. And any sense of being an adult. And all control. … But is this crowd-pleasing work any more profound than a funfair helter-skelter? ‘The funfair experience is completely underrated,’ said Höller. ‘I don’t know why we don’t take it more seriously philosophically and artistically.’ “

The Greek government says its museum built to house the Parthenon Marbles will be opened next year. “Once the museum is completed, Greece will have a very strong argument for the return of the Parthenon sculptures,” Greek Prime Minister Kostas Karamanlis said Monday.

“I expect Norman Foster’s design for a new residential tower at 980 Madison Avenue to infuriate people. Rising out of the old Parke-Bernet Gallery building, a spare 1950 office building between 76th and 77th Streets, its interlocking elliptical forms throw down a challenge to a neighborhood known for an aversion to bold contemporary architecture. The tower’s height, roughly 30 stories, hardly helps its cause…. With a little trimming, though, this could be the most handsome building to rise along Madison Avenue since the Whitney Museum of American Art was completed 40 years ago.”

The Stirling is the UK’s top prize for architecture. “The official line says that the Stirling goes to the British-designed building ‘which has been the most significant for the evolution of architecture in the past year’, a sentence packed with assumptions. Does it go to the prettiest? The most thrilling? To the architect most deserving? Or, old-fashioned notion this, to the building that best fulfils its brief, be it a bicycle shed or a cathedral?”

The Centre Pompidou in France is planning to open a branch in Shanghai, China by the end of 2007.

Two pictures have been withdrawn from a Sotheby’s auction of the work of Damien Hirst. “The genuine limited edition prints are worth up to £10,000 and have drawn attention from forgers who use the latest technology to copy works of art. Sotheby’s confirmed the images had been withdrawn and questions over their authenticity were being investigated.”

After years of looking for a solution to the traffic strangling Britain’s Stone Henge, a radical solution has bee proposed: do nothing. Instead of building expensive tunnels and the like, why not, asks a expert, find ways to encourage walkers and cyclists rather than cars?

With the opening of its new Daniel Libeskind-designed art museum, Denver has amassed an impressive array of public buildings. “There’s an unbelievable assembly with the library and the DAM buildings and the residences. Within a block, you almost can trace the development of architecture since the Second World War.”

“A 2004 study estimated that there were more than 400 galleries in London – probably the tip of the iceberg, as temporary spaces come and go and artists open their studios to sell direct. An Arts Council England report has estimated the contemporary art market as worth £500m – unimaginable even a decade ago. The London art boom will be seen at its most intense next week, when Frieze art fair flings wide its doors… And, just when you think London cannot take any more, still more commercial galleries appear.”

Auctioneers at Christie’s New York were stunned this week when a 78-inch model of the Starship Enterprise that had been expected to sell for around $30,000 instead went for $576,000. There appears to be no truth to the rumor that the winning bidder attempted to pay for his new acquisition with his mom’s credit card.