Category: visual

A group of Italian experts has undertaken to refurbish Iran National Museum as part of Italy’s program to develop cultural and economic cooperation.

“Over the years since its low-key beginnings the Turner has provided the media with many healthy inches of outrage. Now this year they complain that the show was not shocking enough. The Daily Mail says of Starling’s Shedboatshed: ‘To the casual observer it is just a shack.’ Maybe ‘casual observers’ should stay out of art galleries.”

A major find of an ancient Mayan painting changes what we know about the history of Mayan culture. “The find, a 30-by-3-foot mural in vivid colors depicting the ancient culture’s mythology of creation and kingship, is the centerpiece of a larger mural, parts of which were first discovered and exposed in Guatemala four years ago. New radiocarbon tests revealed the painting to be 200 years older than originally estimated, dating to about 100 B.C.”

“Whether you call it the New Cacophony or the Old Cacophony, Agglomerationism, Disorientationism, the Anti Dia, or just a raging bile duct, the practice of mounting sprawling, often infinitely organized, jam-packed carnivalesque installations is making more and more galleries and museums feel like department stores, junkyards, and disaster films. It is an architecture of no architecture, a gesamtkunstwerk or “total artwork,” whose roots are in opera, Dada, the Merzbau, and the madhouse.”

The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal wants to build a home in a grain silo. “The museum’s project, titled Silo No. 5: Musée d’art moderne, imagines the revamping of three historic grain silos on the western edge of Old Montreal, a project that would include a luxury-condo complex and a museum devoted to modern and contemporary art with a special emphasis on the emergence of abstraction in Quebec. The proposed museum would be housed on the 10th and 11th floors of a concrete grain elevator built in 1957 by C. D. Howe and Co. and would showcase the permanent collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.”

Police in california arrest three men after they “allegedly brought a stolen painting valued at more than $40,000 into Atherton gallery Sense Fine Art for appraisal.”

An plan to build a mountain above London’s Serpentine Gallery has failed. “The proposal, put forward by the Dutch architect MVRDV, was hailed as the most ambitious project to date in the Serpentine’s annual programme of temporary summer pavilions. It called for a 23m-high steel frame, enclosing the gallery and covered in artificial grass, which visitors could climb to admire the views of London. However, practical and financial problems led to the design being shelved indefinitely.”

The palace of Nero is closing abruptly for emergency repairs and will be closed for at least two years. “Leaking water is threatening the palace’s frescoed walls. The estimated the cost of repairs is five million euros ($6.8 million). Ministry archaeologists said a full-blown restoration of the palace and the surrounding area would cost 130 million euros ($179 million) over 10 years.

“The Istanbul Modern’s chief curator, Rosa Martínez, calls the museum’s opening ‘a strong aesthetic, social and political statement’ about Turkey’s will ‘to live together with the other European countries.’ Indeed, the plan to build a contemporary museum in the city’s heart had stalled for years until Erdogan’s government cleared the way. Can art in Istanbul remain immune to political pressure or even criticize the status quo? Or will this art be co-opted by political and economic forces?”