Category: visual

“At age 79, the Argentine-born, Connecticut-based architect Cesar Pelli is inevitably described in newspaper and magazine profiles these days as diplomatic and genteel. In his design for the $200-million Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, which opens Friday night, he and his firm have produced a building that brings the very same adjectives to mind. In other words, if you are optimistic enough to believe that classical music — or architecture, for that matter — is an evolving art form with the capacity to provoke as well as merely soothe, you will likely find it enormously disappointing.”

Peoria is getting a new museum, but a contest asking the public to vote on names has backfired. It seems people don’t like any of the names. “Museum leaders chose the four finalists from 500 suggested by surveys, committees and focus groups (‘What was your focus group? A group of 5-year-olds?’ someone wrote on the Web site). Officials hope to choose a name next month.”

That’s what Nicolai Ouroussoff thinks of the latest efforts for the WTC site. “For those who cling to the idea that the site’s haunting history demands a leap of imagination, the towers illustrate how low our expectations have sunk since the city first resolved to rebuild there in a surge of determination just weeks after 9/11.”

The self-styled “guerilla” artist placed a life-size figure representing a hooded prisoner at Guantanamo Bay inside a ride at Disneyland. “A spokeswoman for Banksy said the stunt was intended to highlight the plight of terror suspects at the controversial detention centre in Cuba. Banksy is notorious for his secretive and subversive stunts – such as sneaking doctored versions of classic paintings into major art galleries.”

What to make of the new towers proposed for the site of the World Trade Center? Justin Davidson: “The three new towers have shaken some life back into Libeskind’s ideas. Their peaks sweep upwards, more or less; they disdain symmetry and borrow mildly from his vocabulary of interpenetrating shapes. Call them Libeskind Lite.”

The World Trade Center site is not the only memorial. Throughout the New York region there are other memorials. “Was Sept. 11, 2001 like Dec. 7, 1941: the start of America’s involvement in a global war that was already under way and in which the United States will eventually emerge victorious? Or was it, to name just one other possibility, an alarm that the country has completely misread, and to which it reacted disastrously? How can we properly interpret an event we have barely begun to understand? And how can we hope to do so on so large a scale?”

“If it’s true that architecture holds up an unflinching mirror to society reflecting how we live, then the story our buildings tell five years after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon is as complex — and as conflicted — as America itself.”

Madrid’s Thyssen-Bornemisza museum is appealing a US court’s ruling in “a lawsuit seeking the return of a disputed Impressionist masterpiece allegedly stolen by the Nazis from a Jewish family during World War II.” The Spanish government, which administers the museum, had asked the court to dismiss a lawsuit by a San Diego family which claims it is the proper owner of the Pissarro street scene valued at $20 million.

Washington, D.C.’s National Mall is arguably “America’s greatest 20th century work of civic landscape art.” But in recent years, politicians have given their blessing to a series of projects which Christopher Knight says are ruining the whole area. “The Mall’s planning and oversight process is irreparably broken. At least six federal agencies, eight congressional committees, plus the District of Columbia have jurisdiction — so many competing overlords that no one is effectively in charge. That makes it ripe for exploitation.”