Category: visual

New York’s Drawing Center was to be part of the World Trade center project until controversy torpedoed the deal. Since then the center has been hunting for a home. “Scouring abandoned buildings, vacant parking lots and high-rises, they fell in love with some locations and flatly rejected others, while learning the perils of what its president calls a ‘lack of nimbleness’ by losing out to quick bidders.” Now a home has been found – in the old Fulton Fish Market.

“Robert Rauschenberg may be the American Picasso. He is a Dionysian maverick of experimentation, openness, visual wit, and roguish nerve; an artist who cannot be diminished by others but who can only diminish himself; someone whose envelope-pushing has been inspirational for generations. As Jasper Johns generously avowed, ‘Rauschenberg was the man who in this century invented the most since Picasso’.”

“A German university plans to give back a fragment of the Parthenon sculptures, marking the first time any piece of the statues held outside Greece has been returned to Athens, the Culture Ministry said Monday.”

Museums are now so crowded it’s impossible to really see art. “The more I watch viewers thronging to sample the latest blockbuster shows, or the permanent collections at the Prado, the Louvre and the National Gallery, the less convinced I am that they are giving art any sustained attention. Most visitors move through exhibitions and museums with disconcerting speed. Pausing now and again in front of particular images before resuming the onward march, they do not seem prepared to scrutinise anything for a substantial length of time.”

“Figurative art that was deprecated as hopelessly passé in Paris and Düsseldorf never lost its grip in Leipzig. The city prided itself on being the birthplace of Max Beckmann and (if you looked back a few centuries and across Saxony to Wittenberg) on a painterly lineage begat by Lucas Cranach.”

Visiting a museum is a good way to relieve stress, says a new study. “Analysis of 28 City high flyers who spent their lunch break viewing art found their stress levels fell by 45% after 40 minutes at the Guildhall art gallery in London.”

“Yale historian Hiram Bingham rediscovered Machu Picchu in 1911, and, backed by the National Geographic Society, returned with large expeditions in 1912 and 1915, each time carting out – with supposed special permission from Peruvian President Augusto B. Leguía – crates filled with archeological finds. But now, Peru is threatening to sue the Ivy League school, claiming the permission was either given illegally or misunderstood.”

He is not a household name, even within the art world, and so he might have seemed an underdog for a major directorship at one of America’s leading museums. But Steven Litt is impressed anyway. “In choosing Timothy Rub of Cincinnati as its next director, the Cleveland Museum of Art picked an arts manager who has not yet achieved cultural stardom… Rub transformed local perceptions about the 125-year-old [Cincinnati Art Museum,] long viewed as an elitist institution on a hilltop in Eden Park, overlooking the rest of the city… The new director will need those skills in Cleveland. Rub, whose appointment begins in April, will take over the massive, $258 million expansion and renovation the museum launched in October.”

Fresh off the high of the inevitable crowds that greet a newly expanded and renovated museum, Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center has launched a new initiative designed to draw in a more diverse crowd than would normally spend its free time at a modern art museum. “To put it plainly, the Walker doesn’t feel like any other museum. It feels, for lack of a better word, alive. Every Thursday, [when the museum scraps its admission charge and stays open late,] the Walker’s contorted, dreamlike corridors bustle with activity. People are on dates; some are even dressed up, though not in the suit-and-tie sense. It’s more like they’re going to a nightclub — you’re likely to see miniskirts, fur boots, and overpriced vintage T-shirts. But remember, you’re supposed to be looking at the art.”

“The Dada movement made its name in the early 20th century by trying to destroy the conventional notion of art. Taking literal inspiration from their exploits this week, a latter-day neo-Dadaist took a small hammer to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain,’ the factory-made urinal that is considered the cornerstone of Conceptual Art. The assailant, a French performance artist named Pierre Pinoncelli, was immediately arrested after his act of vandalism… The porcelain urinal was slightly chipped in the attack and was withdrawn to be restored… Mr. Pinoncelli, 77, who urinated into the same urinal and struck it with a hammer in a show in Nîmes in 1993, has a long record of organizing bizarre happenings. Police officials said he again called his action a work of art, a tribute to Duchamp and other Dada artists.”