Category: visual

What are they? The Chicago Tribune has made a list…

“Irish archaeologists are celebrating the discovery of their own Dead Sea scrolls after a bulldozer unearthed fragments of a psalter that may have lain in a bog for more than 1,000 years.”

“More than 35 million people made a trip to a museum, art gallery, historic site or zoo in Canada in 2004, a 10.7 per cent increase from 2002, according to Statistics Canada.”

American officials have returned an important artifact looted from the Iraq National Museum three years ago. “The headless stone statue of the Sumerian king Entemena of Lagash was turned over to the Iraqi government when Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki visited Washington on Wednesday. The statue, which weighs hundreds of pounds, was taken by looters who slid or rolled it down the steps of the museum, damaging both the steps and other artifacts.”

Not according to a new report. “The survey found 140,000 objects that ‘need provenance research,’ far more than the 18,000 objects posted on the Nazi-Era Provenance Internet Portal maintained by the museum association. Most of the museums actively conducting provenance research have completed work on less than half the relevant items in their collections, only about 33% of the museums have a separate budget for the purpose and only about 10% have employed a full-time researcher, the survey says.”

“The addition will make the museum comparable in size to the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The annex, which resembles glass boxes stacked up arbitrarily to form a 220-foot pyramid, has been designed by the Swiss firm Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the same architects who in the late 1990’s turned an abandoned power station on the south bank of the Thames, across from St. Paul’s Cathedral, into Tate Modern.”

Tate Modern is proposing a £165 million extension. Why? “Tate Modern has been a victim of its own extraordinary success. On all too many weekends, it can feel like a surreal cross between some brutalist shopping mall, Piranesian airport lounge and the Seven Circles of Hell. Deadly queues form for its hard-pressed cafes and lavatories. The bookshop can resemble a jumble sale. The galleries are often little more, for all their lofty grandeur, than corridors for crowds to tramp through in search of novelty, rarely stopping to look at the art on display.”

Philadelphia’s hulkingly opulent city hall, an architectural lightning rod since shortly after its completion in 1901, may be about to see its best days yet. “A restoration of the building’s lavish statuary and exteriors, perhaps the nation’s largest-ever art conservation effort, is slowly transforming its dingy main floors into bright granite and marble. Ironwork that was once rusty is now a crisp white. Viewed from the northwest, the renewed facades are a shining panorama its builders could only imagine.”

“Of the 332 museums that were sent questionnaires by the conference in February, 214 responded before a deadline of July 10. Of those, approximately 114, or slightly more than half, said that they were actively conducting provenance work. The remaining 100 museums either said they were not doing such work or did not provide enough information for the Claims Conference to be able to make a determination.”

Two women were killed and 13 people injured when an inflatable sculpture in the UK was blown 70 feet into the air by a gust of wind. “The Dreamspace installation was designed by Maurice Agis, 74, a renowned abstract artist who was at the scene yesterday. The structure is made from thin PVC sheets forming 115 multi-coloured inflated rooms and is about half the size of a football pitch. Visitors pay £5 to enter and wear a cape.”