Category: visual

So many piectures of 9/11. But how to make sense of it? “The technology exists to allow people to spend the rest of their lives re-creating that day, taking it apart minute-by-minute and trying to put it back together again. It is now buildings that rapidly disappear, while digital storage and retrieval of information offers the promise of images that don’t fade and countless opportunities for enhancement, editing and playback of an experience.”

As a promotion for a show of art from the Louvre in Atlanta, animators have created 3D images of some of the art for a TV spot. “Most contemporary artists wouldn’t allow their work to be doctored but because the Louvre pieces are hundreds of years old, ‘we had a little more freedom’.”

“Most art world denizens would instinctively say yes. But if by “change” you mean, can art on its own change global warming, stop Iran’s president from denying the Holocaust, or halt the spread of AIDS, the answer, I’m afraid, is no. In concert with other things, however, art can change the world incrementally and by osmosis.”

We finally get a look at the towers that will surround the World Trade Center site. Doesn’t mean they’ll really be built (WTC politics being what they are) but here they are. “The name-brand architects – Norman Foster of London; Richard Rogers, also of London; and Fumihiko Maki of Tokyo – tweaked the standard Manhattan office-building recipe rather than producing signature star turns.”

“Experts have a tally of 170,000 pieces of missing art — many stolen from private homes, others taken from museum walls or pilfered from storerooms. Only a small fraction are ever found: Interpol puts the figure at around 10 percent.”

“I like to show off. I always buy art with the idea that I’m going to show it. Before, I was always mouthing off about how there aren’t enough collectors. Now there are just too many. They’re all very young and very rich, and they all like to collect art the way they buy their funds.”

Canadian artists don’t make anything on resale of their work. But some have begun demanding licensing fees from auction houses and dealers reprinting images of art to advertise sales. “For their part, auction houses and art dealers warn that such additional fees could tip some of them out of business or drive them away from exhibiting certain artists.”

A fragment of the Parthenon was returned to Greece this week. “The marble fragment of a foot, measuring only a few inches, was placed by Culture Minister George Voulgarakis back on the northern frieze of the 5th century BC Parthenon on Tuesday. Part of the frieze is now in the Acropolis Museum in Athens, but much is in London.”

“Mayor Oscar Goodman, the flamboyant, gin-sipping, sports-gambling, showgirl-squiring executive of Sin City, is caught in a contradiction. For years he had told the world, ‘There is no mob.’ That was when he was a defense lawyer who represented mobsters and even had a cameo playing himself in Martin Scorsese’s ‘Casino.’ Goodman said there were no mobsters–just alleged mobsters. Now, as mayor, he wants to take a National Historic Landmark, the old federal courthouse where he tried his first case, and turn it into a mob museum–and there’s no alleged about it.”

The design and building process for the World Trade Center has been a disaster, writes Paul Goldberger. “Forty years seem not to have got us beyond the folly of Nelson Rockefeller and the building of the original World Trade Center. And they haven’t freed us from the use of sanctimonious rhetoric to cover up what, ultimately, has turned out to be a lot more like a typical New York real-estate saga than anything else.”