Category: visual

New Role For London’s ICA?

The new head of London’s Institute for Contemporary Art says that “the institute’s historic role as the place in Britain where fresh developments in modern American and European art could be witnessed – it was the first British gallery to show a Jackson Pollock – was no longer relevant, given the proliferation of galleries and museums such as Tate Modern. But its programmes of performance, film, music, art and talks should ‘provoke and challenge, keep pushing the boundaries. Britain deserves a space that tries to ask the deep questions; where people can look at the complexity of the world around them’.”

Needed – New Ethics On Artifacts

“The latest troubles should cause Americans to ask questions about our ethics and practices. Do the Met, the Cleveland Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston – places that bring together cultures from around the world, act as safe houses for civilization and provide public access to millions of people – also have claims to the world’s art, claims that legitimately compete with the nationalist goals of countries that cannot always provide the same care and access? Isn’t it better for an ancient pot dug out of some farm in Sicily to end up at a museum like the Met, where it can be studied, widely seen and cared for, than to become booty in some billionaire’s safe in Zurich, Shanghai or Tokyo? At the same time, does encouraging the movement of artifacts into museums stimulate looting and, in the process, impede the circulation of critical information about the provenance, or history, of these objects?”

Next Thing You Know, The Scream Will Turn Up On eBay

“The folks at [Germany’s] Pirmasens Museum had long given up hope that a cache of paintings by that city’s most famous 19th-century painter, Heinrich Burkel, would ever be found… Then this fall Heike Wittmer, the museum’s director and archivist, saw what looked like three of the missing Burkels on a Web site advertising an art auction in Concordville, Pa., outside Philadelphia. Wittmer contacted cultural officers in the German government, who in turn contacted the FBI’s new Art Crime Team… The paintings, valued at about $125,000, found their way in the 1960s to a New Jersey man who bequeathed them to his daughter about 20 years later.”

On Further Reflection, The New MoMA Does Not Suck

New York’s Museum of Modern Art may have gotten an unprecedented wave of publicity when it opened its new home last year, but that doesn’t mean that the critics spared MoMA their sharpest critiques. It seemed that nearly everyone had some quibble or other with the new building, but after a year to get used to the new setting, no one seems to be complaining any more.

Ukraine’s New Wave of Political Art

The so-called “Orange Revolution” that gripped Ukraine in 2004 and carried opposition leader Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency had a profound impact on every facet of existence in the former Soviet republic. One side effect of the month of protests and confrontations was the emergence of a newly energized political art movement. “[The revolution] announced a new wave of Ukrainian artists, several of whom pulled off the neat postmodern trick of simultaneously appropriating, satirizing and extending the conventions of Soviet-style poster art from Stalin to Gorbachev.”