Category: visual

“One of Britain’s most outspoken architects has emerged as a frontrunner to become London’s ‘design tsar’ promising more landmark buildings and attacking the current lack of ‘coherent vision’. Will Alsop, whose series of controversial buildings and city plans earned him the nickname of Mr Blobby because of his passion for curved forms, buildings on stilts and bright colours, has applied to become director of design for London. The move is widely viewed as a challenge to an establishment of which he has become increasingly critical.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered a nationwide inventory of cultural treasures after valuable works were stolen from the Hermitage Museum… Art experts say Russian museums, galleries and archives have been suffering from lax security, poor record-keeping and lack of funding for years.”

From New York’s Freedom Tower to Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, Witold Rybczynski ponders why important buildings so often fail to live up to their promise. Noting that “for every successful icon there are scores of failures,” he asks, “What do you do when your starchitect doesn’t deliver the goods?”

With Derek Gillman plucked from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to become executive director and president of the Barnes Foundation, Edward J. Sozanski wonders how the new leader will handle a project that “promises to be several orders of magnitude more demanding than anything Gillman has tackled so far.” His primary task? Raising “the several hundred million dollars the foundation needs to underwrite a radical transformation from school and domestically scaled gallery to international tourist attraction” as the collection is relocated to Philadelphia.

“It’s an undercover movement–literally: Tattoos have become a fad among many young Iranian women who proudly display them in private but must keep them under wraps from authorities.”

“If all goes as planned, and that is no sure bet, an unlikely crew on an improbable craft will amble the Mississippi for the next month, spreading culture and chaos downriver. For more than a week, the ‘Miss Rockaway Armada’ — a few dozen self-selected artists from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Seattle, San Francisco and beyond — has toiled … on the banks of the Mississippi River, assembling salvage wood and cadged Styrofoam into three interconnected rafts, each 20 feet long. … Theoretically, the crew plans to stop in various river towns to give workshops on everything from silkscreening to power tools and put on a performance — a kind of punk-rock musical variety show — followed by a dance party.”

“From a promontory high above the Pentagon, three arching spires reach skyward, their elongated tips pointing to the infinity of space. They appear as abstract art forms but only until their symbolism is made clear by their setting: They are the starring elements of a memorial to the United States Air Force, the only branch of the American military that has not had a prominent monument in the Washington area. More than 14 years in planning, the memorial is in the final stages of construction and will be dedicated Oct. 14.”

“As American Indian and other groups have become increasingly assertive about guarding their cultural heritage, museums have struggled to strike a balance between the traditional practice of collecting indigenous objects as art and the often competing interests of the people whose ancestors produced them. … In guidelines be released today, the Association of Art Museum Directors calls on museums to consult with indigenous groups to determine what works might fall into this category and to accommodate the wishes of these groups as far as possible in displaying, conserving and even discussing these works on museum labels and in catalogs.”

“Since 9/11, many museums in Europe and the United States have begun highlighting collections and exhibitions of Islamic art as a way of promoting greater understanding and bridging the cultural gap between the Judeo-Christian and Muslim worlds. In Western Europe this strategy also implies recognition that, because of heavy immigration from North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Islam is now also a European religion, and it is therefore important both for Europeans to show respect for Islamic culture and for Muslim immigrants and their children to take pride in their past. But are we asking too much of art, giving it too much political weight?”

There’s been another museum theft in Russia. This time it’s an archive of a famous architect’s work worth millions of dollars and stolen from a state archive. “The crime, blamed by the archive’s director on unscrupulous staff, came just more than a week after Russia’s most famous museum — the Hermitage — announced the theft over a period of years of more than 220 artworks valued at $5 million.”