Category: visual

“A simple plate-glass window festooned with goods is no longer enough to stimulate the desensitized public. To compete with soulless megamalls and the Internet, shops are returning to their loyal old helpmeets: architects. The ancient Romans concentrated their stores in dense arcades, an idea that the 19th century picked up with enclosed gallerias, which in turn begat the modern indoor mall 50 years ago.”

Each summer London’s Serpentine Gallery has commissioned an architect to imagine a new space. “The architects commissioned so far have taken the idea and run with it, invariably assisted by the structural know-how of Cecil Balmond, co-chairman of Arup. But even by the Serpentine’s standards, this year’s design should be something else. It is the brainchild of Dutch visionary and long-time Londoner Rem Koolhaas.”

“Want to pretend you don’t have a TV? Get the Groove Tube, a low-tech way to turn a high-tech TV into a light sculpture. Designed by Seattle artist Matt Griesey, it’s a translucent box made of paper and plastic with a grid of opaque dividers that attaches to the screen with suction cups. When the TV (or computer) is on, the Groove Tube averages the picture pixels and creates an ever-changing display of colors in each square. Just turn down the sound and turn up the stereo.”

Harry Callahan was “the greatest visual artist who ever grew to maturity in Chicago,” writes Alan Artner. He was “up there with Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Ansel Adams. His work has been collected by every major art museum and has been seen in several retrospectives. But while most Chicagoans have heard of Adams, ask about Callahan and you’re likely to hear only about the movie cop played by Clint Eastwood, suggesting that special measures need to be taken.”

“The new, Starbucks-like look that McDonald’s has rolled out in this classic Middle American test-market tickles the design palette in a way that no knock-your-eyes-out architectural whammy by Frank Gehry or Santiago Calatrava ever will. We visit museums by those architectural stars, but we practically live in McDonald’s. The company estimates that more than 25 million people a day eat at its U.S. outlets. And now McDonald’s is playing a controversial, high-stakes game of architectural catch-up, transforming its harsh, plastic-heavy interiors into soft, earth-toned places where you might linger with your laptop in an upholstered chair beneath a stylish pendant light.”

“With the approach of the 70th anniversary of Guernica’s destruction by German bombers serving the nationalist forces in the Spanish Civil War”, the townspeople of Guernica are seeking the iconic Picvasso work’s relocation from Madrid’s Reina Sofia modern art museum.

The famed Nimrud Gold was to have been shown at Washington’s Sackler Gallery. “I always felt that the gallery could not serve as a venue unless we received clear guarantees on a number of points, principally relating to security and funding. When no such guarantees were received, we concluded that we could not proceed.”

“It is, if you will forgive a little flourish of Gallic overstatement, a catastrophe sunk in a swamp of hubris, though there is a lovely caff and ace office block in the not quite finished garden. Like many messes, it began with the noblest of intentions.”

Paris’ new Musee du Quai Branly “simply makes no sense” writes Michael Kimmelman. “Old, new, good, bad are all jumbled together without much reason or explanation, save for visual theatrics. If the Marx Brothers designed a museum for dark people, they might have come up with the permanent-collection galleries: devised as a spooky jungle, red and black and murky, the objects in it chosen and arranged with hardly any discernible logic, the place is briefly thrilling, as spectacle, but brow-slappingly wrongheaded. Colonialism of a bygone era is replaced by a whole new French brand of condescension.”