Category: visual

In LA, museum spaces have begun programming Lowbrow in earnest. “Some of Lowbrow’s newfound respectability comes from being associated with hip art-world trends.”

“Southern California has become the unrivaled international hub of new-media art, design and theory. About 100 Southern California artists, theorists and curators, are at the forefront of a media-art movement destined to help it all make sense.”

“The long-awaited and much-delayed Acropolis Museum will be ready by the end of next year, the government said yesterday, while insisting that it would keep up its efforts toward the return of the Elgin Marbles so they can be housed in the new building. Construction of the museum, a few hundred meters from the Acropolis, was meant to have been finished in time for last year’s Athens Olympics.”

Britain’s Channel 4 hopes to create great public art. “The Big Art Project is seeking nominations from communities, identifying sites where a piece of significant public art could be placed. Six sites will be shortlisted by a panel of experts in January, and the series will follow the progress of the communities working with artists to commission and create the pieces. The completed works are expected to be unveiled in October 2007.”

“To celebrate the reopening of the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery next July, a coalition of cultural organizations is organizing a salute to America’s originality. The two museums, which share the historic Patent Office Building, will open July 1 after a six-year, multimillion-dollar renovation. A special 24-hour preview of the massive building, with 30,000 square feet of additional gallery space, will be held that day.”

To read many of the stories written about Frank Gehry these days, you’d think that one of his buildings was all that was required for a destitute city to leap into the forefront of global metropolises. But in Paris (which gets along just fine on its own merits,) the one Gehry-designed structure has sat abandoned for a decade, “a sad monument to a failed American dream. It was planned as a new headquarters for the American Center of Paris, which was founded in 1931 and had long drawn crowds to its rambling Left Bank home as a place to discover American culture and to learn English. But the dream of a dazzling image went sour. The new center opened in June 1994 – and closed just 19 months later… Now, thanks to the French government, the building has begun a new life, this time as the headquarters of the Cinémathèque Française.”

Santiago Calatrava is “the most crowd-pleasing architect since Frank Gehry. His work, too, is dazzling and emotionally engaging. And, just as Gehry exploited the trend of museum building in the nineteen-nineties, Calatrava has aligned himself with the latest architectural fashion: bespoke luxury-apartment towers.”

“Celebrity demands a suspension of judgment; there are no objective criteria and it is meaningless. Famous for being famous is circular and nowhere does that circle touch the real world. Art, though, demands judgment, belongs in the real world and promises meaning. For that reason, contemporary art has developed an industry of spurious commentary.”

Getty president Barry Munitz sits down to address the controversies swirling around the institution – the Italian artifacts case, morale, his salary and the infamous Porsche. Are staff jumping ship? “There hasn’t been a massive outflow. There hasn’t even been a major outflow of people. The museum director resigned and one other person who was her closest partner and colleague went at the same time. Not a single person left the museum in the year since she left. Everybody stayed. We went from a search (for a new curator) and hired the No. 1 candidate on everybody’s list, Michael Brand.”

A number of American arts institutions are selling off some of their art. “The scale of such selling – by institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art – is renewing debate. ‘History will make a fool of these museums. It always happens. Often the things that are sold are based on inherited prejudices that will be overturned in the future’.”