Category: visual

The clunky statue of Rocky from the Sylvester Stallone movie franchise is coming back to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Critic Edward Sozanski thinks that’s just fine. “Copenhagen has its little mermaid and New York has its library lions. So why can’t the citizens of Philadelphia and their paying guests have their Rocky? As Michael Corleone observed, it’s strictly business. The only thing wrong with Rocky Reborn is the intended placement.”

“A look at contrasting aesthetic intuitions about wind farms reveals a paradigm shift in how we understand beauty. Our sense of the nature of beauty cannot be separated from our sense of the beauty of nature…”

What will Atlanta’s High Museum deal with the Louvre to borrow artwork look like? Lee Rosenbaum asks the question: “How many of those loans will actually come from the Louvre’s A-List? The High is paying top dollar for the cachet of the French museum’s imprimatur.” But the museum could be sending lesser works by well-known names. “The proof will be in the seeing. But the proliferation of high-rent shows, whereby major museums beef up their budgets at the expense of other museums, seems like the wrong kind of fundraising.”

The Israel Museum is to get a $50 million renovation and expansion. “The museum buildings, which sit on a 20 acre site, have grown from 5,000 to 50,000 sq. m since the museum opened in 1965. Plans are being drawn up to reorganise, expand and update the various museum buildings and create new buildings to improve entry, services and circulation for the visitors, which vary between 500,000 and one million a year.”

“A year after exploring a $75 million expansion that would create three new floors underground, the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has decided on a relatively modest $25 million renovation that involves little construction.”

“For architects, China is the land of dreams. The construction statistics tantalize. The Chinese consume 54.7 percent of the concrete and 36.1 percent of the steel produced in the world, according to a 2004 report in Architectural Record. Hungry architects are drawn to China by the abundance of economic opportunities. But Herzog & de Meuron, the Swiss firm that designed the stadium, doesn’t need to drum up business. It has more work than it can handle.” And yet, the promise of China is also the problem with China…

“New Urbanism arose as a reaction to sprawl, the default American landscape of highways lined with strip malls and big-box stores and suburban subdivisions populated by a homogeneous and insulated middle class. The New Urbanists proposed higher-density, pedestrian-friendly communities: old-fashioned neighborhoods with schools and shops, parks and offices, single-family homes and low-income apartment buildings, all mixed together and connected by shady streets and wide sidewalks.” But is that what Biloxi wants?

“In recent years, it is architecture more than any other aspect of contemporary culture that has touched the rawest nerves. It was architecture that Saddam Hussein used to consolidate his grip on Iraq. And it was architecture that the Serbs and the Croats deployed in the first stages of their bloody battle over the division of the former Yugoslavia… Often quite wrongly, architecture is equated with political beliefs…

“Unlike most other architectural stars, Renzo Piano has no signature style. Instead, his work is characterized by a genius for balance and context, an ability to establish inventive correspondences between his buildings and those that surround them. Until now, New York hasn’t had a building by Piano, but his expansion of the Morgan Library, which has just reopened as the Morgan Library & Museum, is the beachhead for what may become a significant presence in the city.”

Thomas Kinkade – the self-styles “painter of light” – is designing a series of homes in Idaho to look like housees in his paintings. “The California artist, beloved by middlebrow America but reviled by the art establishment, has signed a deal with developers in this resort city to help design five lake-view houses that are copies of homes in paintings such as ‘Beyond Autumn Gate.’ The houses will cost $4 million to $6 million.”