Category: visual

The Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto will shut for 6-8 months while construction of its building is completed. “The gallery’s ambitious, Frank Gehry-designed transformation and expansion, expected to cost $254-million, has already cost it almost a 30-per-cent decline in visitors. About 665,425 people strolled among the paintings and sculptures in 2004-05, but last year only 475,000 visitors found their way past the hoardings to the temporary side entrance to view art amid the occasional rattle of jackhammers.”

“The truth is that applying words such as ‘worth’ and ‘value’ to art is an abuse of language. They are terms not of art but of a science, that of economics. They describe price in a market in which supply is fixed but demand exorbitant. Nobody does Klimts any more. The picture was expensive because, unless Christie’s was pulling a fast one in a “negotiated” secret deal, there must have been another buyer prepared to pay nearly as much. Getting journalists to hype a work of art to legitimise its market price is playing with words.”

The Southwest Museum’s deal with the Gene Autry Museum has critics screaming bait-and-switch. “The dispute illustrates a continuing issue in the museum world. When cash-poor but collection-rich institutions are forced into partnerships with their opposites, often no one is left happy.”

Artist Damien Hirst is in negotiations to replace the shark in his iconic work featuring a shark in formaldehyde. “The animal suspended in formaldehyde has deteriorated dramatically to the naked eye since it was first unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery in 1992 because of the way it was preserved by the artist. The solution which surrounds it is murky, the skin of the animal is showing considerable signs of wear and tear, and the shark itself has changed shape.”

Taiwan’s National Palace Museum is about to open a newly completed renovation. “The museum houses the largest collection of Chinese art and artefacts in the world, consisting mainly of holdings of the last emperor of China, Pu Yi, who was forced out of the Forbidden City in Beijing in 1925. The holdings were then moved from city to city to avoid looting by the Imperial Japanese Army. Most of the collection was transported to Taiwan in the late 1940s by Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the former Republic of China.”

The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery will both reopen this weekend following six years of renovation, and where once the two institutions shared a building but not a mission, they have been redesigned to function together. “A proliferation of offices and interior walls that once narrowed viewing space are gone, giving way to floor plans that sweep visitors from one museum to the other and back again… As they collaborate to tell America’s story through ideas and ideals, one conveys it thematically, the other through portraiture, each celebrating the complex forces and figures that have shaped the country since pre-Colonial times.”

In designing Paris’s new Musée du Quai Branly, architect Jean Nouvel didn’t exactly take the easiest road to public acclaim. “Defiant, mysterious and wildly eccentric, it is not an easy building to love. Its jumble of mismatched structures, set in a lush, rambling garden on the Left Bank of the Seine in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, hardly conforms to notions of Parisian elegance… Yet for all of its flaws, Jean Nouvel’s building creates a kaleidoscopic montage of urban impressions. And once you give yourself over to the experience, you may find it the greatest monument to French popular culture since the Pompidou.”

Want to sell your house? It might sell better with some great art in it, and so you hire a “home stager.” “Home staging is a trend that’s been around at least 10 years in the hot real-estate markets of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and is now keeping up to 20 different enterprises in business here in Seattle. Using original art rather than inexpensive pastoral prints is the newest twist.”

The Southwest Museum is going through a major overhaul, redefining itself. “Some of the museum’s neighbors, however, say it’s more like a hijacking than a redefinition. Denouncing ‘cultural piracy,’ the Friends of the Southwest Museum coalition contend that the people behind the move are dodging ‘a moral responsibility to maintain and revitalize’ the institution’s original location.

“Whistler’s Mother is one of the world’s most famous paintings… Yet in the recent edition of a prominent art history textbook, ‘Whistler’s Mother’ was omitted for the first time.”