Category: visual

Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for “more human misery than anything else in history.” Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? “The arguments boil down to claims that Modernism was inhuman, authoritarian and technically inept. But if it was really so bad, and if it was really confined to a tiny and irrelevant coterie, why does it look so good [in museum shows today,] and why was it so all-pervasive in its influence? Above all, why are its critics still so worried about it?”

Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that modernism is back in a big way. From the much-celebrated iPod to Frank Gehry’s shiny monoliths to “all the chrome-and-leather furniture and cubic shelving that sells to our most fashion-forward loft dwellers: It was all first dreamed up in the 1920s or before.”

“When Ottoman ruler Mehmed II asked Venice for a ‘good painter’, he was sent Gentile Bellini, whose portrait of him brought a lasting touch of the Renaissance to the east.” At the same time, the influence of Bellini’s portrait on Western art was unmistakable, and may represent the original globalization of the European art world.

Video art frequently has trouble finding a permanent place in traditional museums and galleries. So why not try displaying it somewhere else? In, say, a shopping mall? “Encouraged by the popularity of their free summer film series, which featured James Bond movies one year and Marilyn Monroe pictures another, managers of [a suburban Colorado mall] have begun screening classic video art in their courtyard.”

Plans for a theme park-like attraction designed to showcase the life and work of John Constable in the British valley depicted in much of the artist’s most famous work have been scrapped in the wake of vigorous opposition to the project. The developer in charge of the plans says he will revise them and try again soon.

The €260 million Musée du Quai Branly – Paris’s first major new museum since the Pompidou Centre opened in 1977 – opens this week after ten years of planning and construction. The museum, which celebates Asian and African culture and art, has been a favorite project of French President Jacque Chirac, “but when the museum’s directors opened the site for previews this week before its June launch, historians were already questioning what they feared could be a patronising attempt to display African works in a ‘mock jungle’ setting that rehashed ‘all France’s old colonial cliches’.”

A Venice landscape painted by JMW Turner sold in New York this week for $35.9 million, bringing 80% more than its expected sale price and shattering the record for British paintings sold at auction. “The sale shows that the worldwide boom in the art market is lifting prices in almost all sectors of art… The Turner sale reflects the continued strength of the US market, which has led London and Paris in pushing up prices.”

“Up until a few years ago, the presence of children in art galleries and performance spaces wouldn’t have been an issue — because there weren’t any. They weren’t prohibited per se, but they were simply seldom seen. The message was that art was for adults. But today’s parents bring their children everywhere, and as more art lovers, collectors and artists themselves have kids, it has become perfectly normal to see little ones at openings.” The influx of kids has gallery officials in a quandary – they’re torn between delight that small fry are being exposed to culture, and abject terror that they’ll break, smear, or deface something.

“For most of the last 60 years, Maria Altmann did not know that the celebrated Klimt paintings hanging in the Austrian Gallery in Vienna actually belonged to her. And when she learned that they most likely did, she also knew that recovering them was probably an impossible quest. But in an unexpected turn of events, the endless ripples of World War II history have washed up on the shore of a California museum, where this week the 90-year-old Mrs. Altmann came face to face with the sumptuous gold and sinuous lines of Gustav Klimt’s portrait of her aunt.”

For years, art experts have noted that the original copy of Norman Rockwell’s painting, “Breaking Home Ties,” appears to be lighter in color than the prints that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1954. The discrepancy has long been blamed on an overly aggressive cleaning of the work. But now, the truth has come out: cartoonist Don Trachte, who owned the painting for years, apparently made a sophisticated copy in the 1970s and hid the original in a secret compartment in his Vermont home, in an effort to avoid losing the Rockwell in a bitter divorce. It wasn’t until last month that Trachte’s sons discovered the genuine article, right where their father had left it.