Category: visual

“For eight years, curators, conservators, lighting experts and stonemasons have been methodically making small but significant improvements to the five medieval cloisters that were fashioned into [a Metropolitan Museum of Art branch operation] in 1938… The most noticeable addition by far, however, is just beginning to become visible. A wall of windows in the Early Gothic Hall that face west overlooking the Hudson has been carefully restored and given an exterior protective glazing in preparation for the addition of 14 panels of mainly 13th-and 14th-century stained-glass windows.”

“Today, armed with a clutch of actual buildings, a Pritzker Prize and a pile of big commissions (as well as the Guggenheim show), 56-year-old Hadid has joined the select society of designers charged with keeping the future up-to-date. Her architecture is so impeccably modern – so virtuously free of reference to Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals – that it appears to belong to a time the rest of us haven’t experienced yet.”

residents of Merion, Pennsylvania, are organizing to try to block the Barnes Collection’s move to Philadelphia. The activists say that the barnes’ neighbors had proposed way to increase the number of visitors to the museum and generate more income. “We are here because the move is not a done deal. We refuse to except the theft and ruin of a treasure.”

Washington, D.C.’s Martin Luther King Memorial Library is the district’s only building designed by acclaimed architect Mies van der Rohe, but Benjamin Forgey says you wouldn’t know it from the way the landmark building is being treated as D.C. politicians push for a new central library. “The idea that the 1972 Mies building cannot be renovated into a first-class 21st-century library is absurd… The city’s idea of selling the Mies building to help pay for its new toy is shameful. There is simply no other way to put it. It is to treat a significant work of architecture as if it were a trifling leftover.”

This year’s Basel Art Fair is crawling with high-end dealers and prominent collectors from around the world, all intent on snapping up the hottest pieces on view. “Many felt the offerings were more predictable than in past years, making the fair a venue for acquiring blue-chip artists rather than discovering new talent… Few buyers seemed surprised by the high prices, but many marveled at the diversity of today’s players.”

“Britain’s Royal Academy of Art put a block of slate on display, topped by a small piece of wood, in the mistaken belief it was a work of art. The slate and wooden stick was actually a base meant to hold up a laughing human head made by British sculptor David Hensel.”

“On a trip to see his work in situ, he came across the slate slab and the tiny piece of wood that supported the sculpture, but the macabre countenance was nowhere to be seen. That, the Royal Academy said, was because the artist had submitted the two components separately and the judges had simply preferred the plinth to the head.”

One of Canada’s most prominent art collectors died this week, and some are saying that the loss of Kenneth Thomson will leave a gaping void in the country’s art market. “Even while helping to buttress the high end of the market for the rarest major Canadian works, observers say Thomson indirectly broadened the interest for lesser known and contemporary Canadian art.”

US museums are buying at this year’s ArtBasel. But “even the largest, state-funded European museums are expressing fears that they are being left behind in the current boom. Most do not enjoy such a rich tradition of philanthropy or such generous tax breaks as US museums, while across Europe governments are squeezing cultural budgets.”

“No one actually believes that any kind of art or painting is dead, but much work these days is either about art being dead or near death. This has caused a kind of feedback loop of infinite regress to form, along with a new batch of self-reflective critique art. Curators seem to love this hyper-self-consciousness—presumably because it’s about the institutions they work for. Art that critiques the art object, the artist, the institution, or the market is lauded. Much good art has arisen from this position. So have questionable gestures.”