Category: visual

Calatrava’s City Canvas

Architect Santiago Calatrava has been using Valencia, Spain as his canvas, building one of Europe’s biggest performing arts palaces. “It’s a flashy new culture palace all right, designed by one of the world’s premier league ‘starchitects’, Calatrava, and it could well do for Spain’s third city what Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim did for Bilbao. But there are some key differences. First and foremost, Valencia is Calatrava’s home town. He was born there, grew up there, studied there and even published a book on the city’s architecture. And although his office is based in Zurich, Calatrava has been building in Valencia for most of his career.”

American Says Klimt Paintings Should Remain In Austria

The American woman who won ownership in an Austrian court of five Gustav Klimt paintings that had been looted by Nazis from her family, says she’d like the paintings to remain in Austria. But the Austrian culture minister says that “Austria could not afford to buy back the paintings, citing media reports that Adele Bloch-Bauer I, also called the ‘Golden Adele’, alone was worth between 70 million and 100 million euros. 70 million euros amounts to the whole budget for all museums in Austria — all public museums’.”

Britain’s Museum Crisis

“Since 1993, the acquisitions budgets of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum have dropped by 90 per cent. The Government says that museums can decide how much of their grant-in-aid they spend on purchases, but this is specious, because they are so cash-strapped that they cannot afford to allocate more to acquisitions.”

How New York Became The Center Of The Art World

“To be sure, cultural power customarily follows financial power. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that postwar New York should have assumed the preeminence that Paris had enjoyed in 1900, or Rome in 1600. But what was remarkable was that a country with such a long record of philistine indifference to visual culture could move in a single generation from art’s provincial periphery to its very epicenter.”

Austrian Court Awards Klimt Paintings To Californian Woman

An Austrian court has ruled that Austria should give back five paintings by Gustav Klimt to a California woman says were stolen from her Jewish family by the Nazis. “The Austrian arbitration court determined the country is legally obligated to give the paintings to Maria Altmann, the heir of the family who owned them before the Nazis took over Austria in 1938, the Austria Press Agency reported.”

How Documentarians Became Artists

Photographs celebrating “real life” – gritty, unadorned reality undisturbed by notions of art or beauty – are the hottest thing going these days. But are such snapshots of life really the type of thing that belongs in a gallery alongside more traditional genres? “In these unelitist times, most of us would now question the old distinction between art on the one hand and photography (and documentary film) on the other… We don’t usually look for sociological information from drawings and sculptures. But there are times of crisis when artists are commissioned to do their bit for the nation, and even before the war, in the early 1930s, Benjamin Britten, WH Auden and William Coldstream were all contributing to the documentary movement. Art was to be brought to the people, and the people into art.”

Using Art To Attract Celebrity, Cash, and Youth

A new generation of art enthusiasts is coming of age (as are their investment portfolios,) and museums are scrambling to find new ways to integrate the new blood into their existing mix. “All the major museums in New York sponsor junior groups,” which seem to exist mainly to throw lavish parties and attract celebrities and cash. “Junior museum boards were originally closed, invitation-only groups aimed at the children of established donors. Over the years, however… the boards have opened wider. Today the junior groups are open to anyone who can pay the annual dues (which range from $500 to $1,000), and foot the $150 to $200 needed to attend the galas. And each party is more opulent than the last.”