Category: visual

Over the past few decades, while museum attendance at big city museums has soared, the numbers at smaller rural museums have fallen by about half. Why? “Numerous causes have been cited for this precipitous decline, including the weather and 9/11. But one factor stands out among the reasons behind this consistent, decades-long trend: the 1978 deregulation of the airline industry and a new era of cheap air travel.”

Japan has a long and glorious artistic tradition, of course, but you wouldn’t necessarily expect the country to come up when discussing the sources of influence in European art. But in fact, Western art reveals plenty of “modern manifestations of the classical Japanese aesthetic.”

“If the history of Africa tells us anything, it is that producing great art is no guarantee of winning anyone’s respect. It seems incredible, when you look at the masterpieces of African art in the British Museum, that exploiters and imperialists could ever have dismissed the disparate peoples of Africa as lesser breeds, ripe for the plucking. Africa has created some of the greatest art that ever existed, and the brilliance of it has been known to Europeans for a long time… And yet the African experience suggests that even when oppressors acknowledge, quite fulsomely, the beauty of your art, this doesn’t stop them classing it as ‘primitive’ and continuing to treat you as a lower form of life.”

Much of the classical ancient art sold in recent decades is believed to have passed through the hands of three men – Giacomo Medici, Robert E. Hecht Jr. and Robin Symes. They “acquired items that had been illegally removed from Italian tombs and used fake ownership histories, rigged auctions and relied on frontmen to sell the objects with a veneer of legitimacy. Italians say they have traced more than a hundred looted artifacts handled by the dealers to the Getty, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a dozen other major museums and private collections in the U.S., Europe and Asia.”

“Genoa has just opened a museum that is endowed with a remarkable private collection of more than 20,000 pieces dating from between 1880 and 1945. It includes paintings, sculptures, furniture, glass, ceramics, wrought iron, textiles, architectural projects (built and unbuilt), graphic design, political and publicity posters and leaflets, books, periodicals and newspapers.”

Italian police have busted a 74-year-old who plundered thousands of ancient artifacts. “Officers who raided the man’s home found 9,000 antiquities stolen over a period of years as well a sophisticated restoration lab, metal detectors and other devices used by amateur archaeologists. Thousands of Etruscan and Roman terracotta vases, polychrome mosaic tiles, pieces of travertine and multi-coloured marble that once adorned Roman villas were recovered.”

Sculptor Anish Kapoor has been chosen to replace Chris Ofili as one of three working artists on the Tate board of directors. “He fills a vacancy created when Ofili – whose Upper Room was controversially purchased by the Tate in March – came to the scheduled end of his reign there last month. The Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who is in charge of re-appointments, is believed to have chosen Kapoor from a shortlist of two given to him earlier in the year.”

The Royal Ontario Museum unveiled several new galleries yesterday, and the early response is overwhelmingly positive. “The new spaces will feature the art and archaeology of China, Japan and Korea and a gallery will be devoted to artifacts created by Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples. This is the first time in 25 years that the ROM has had a permanent location for its First Peoples collection.” The museum isn’t done yet – construction is continuing on Daniel Libeskind’s five-story steel-and-glass addition, which is expected to be completed in late 2006.

Much has been made in recent years about the sudden emergence of architects as artistic superstars, and many in the art world have begun to question whether museums are focusing on their facades to the detriment of their collections. But even with all the new construction going on across North America, “most United States museums have only about 5% of their permanent collections on display” at any given time. And the crunch goes beyond gallery space to issues of storage: after all, how a museum preserves the art it isn’t displaying is just as important as how it presents art to the public, but raising money for storage facilities just doesn’t have the allure of getting one’s name on a new building.

All across Canada, the arts are experiencing a construction boom unlike any other in modern memory, as museums and galleries scramble to open the biggest, best, and most recognizable buildings they can afford. But for all the focus on architecture, Canada’s art institutions still face an uphill battle in bringing great art into the country, and keeping it there. “There’s still no significant, amply funded international biennial being staged on Canadian soil. Compromised acquisition budgets in the major museums prevent our curators from having real clout abroad… But from what we saw in 2005, at least we can say we are heading in the right direction. 2006 will be a year to keep building, but it should also be a year to think hard about what we are going to look at once all that building is done.”