Category: visual

The Denver Art Museum unveils its $62.5 million renovation this week, and museum officials are readying for a deluge of curious visitors. In fact, regulating human traffic flow is one of the major ongoing concerns for museums looking to upgrade their digs.

Officials at San Francisco’s Contemporary Jewish Museum have been keeping a close eye on architect Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Denver Art Museum, since Libeskind is also designing the Jewish Museum’s new digs. “His Denver building shows that what seems outrageous on paper can be bracing in real life.”

Blair Kamen says there’s no question that Daniel Libeskind has designed a gem of a building in Denver. But how does the new wing do as a showcase for the art it was built to house? Well… “It is a startling, sometimes over-the-top piece of architectural sculpture, a surprisingly sensitive shaper of urban spaces and a disappointingly spotty art museum in which basic functional problems have not been adequately solved, like how visitors, especially those who are blind, will move around without conking their heads on the architect’s insistently tilting walls.”

The California Biennial seems awfully un-Californian this year, to judge from the diverse array of states from which the featured artists hail. Of course, that in itself could be said to be fairly Californian…

Harvard’s Woodberry Poetry Room is a masterpiece. But “the Woodberry, along with the rest of Lamont Library, re-opened this fall after a renovation. You can walk into the room today and you’ll see what appears to be a perfectly nice place, pleasant and forgettable. Harvard has carefully preserved a lot of what was here before. Nothing is gone except, well, everything.”

Ronald Lauder has raised $190 million. Could he be thinking of trying to buy more Klimts for his Neue Gallerie when they come up for auction? “Each one would have something to add to the Neue Galerie’s collection, but if the buyer is not the Neue Galerie, I hope they will end up in other museums.”

The century is still young, but Richard Cork wonders where the new art stars are. “Looking around, I can find no equivalents to the precocious titans who, precisely 100 years ago, overturned all existing ideas about the future direction of art.”

The Mexican government is asking churches to catalogue their artwork. “Mexico has a wealth of colonial art, including paintings, sculptures, stained glass and sacred objects, spread among its churches. But a demand for such works among collectors has made the contents of rural parishes a tempting target for thieves.”

“Some people strolling past the Queens Museum of Art in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park [New York] assume that the building is closed. And many motorists speed by it on the Grand Central Parkway without realizing that the museum even exists. The building itself has an eclectic history cluttered with the contributions of earlier architects.” So how do you remake a museum in such a way as to encourage people to take note of its very existence?

Major changes at the Brooklyn Museum have the institution in turmoil. “Curators see the changes as a way of diminishing their traditional power to conceive, propose and organize exhibitions. As many as eight curators have retired or resigned over the last two years.”