Category: visual

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the troubled rebuilding of the World Trade Center Site project would be better off if developer Larry Silverstein was booted out. “Abandoning his usually bland statements of support, the mayor said for the first time that New York would be better off if Silverstein were booted from the site. ‘It would be in the city’s interest to get Silverstein out, [but] nobody can figure out how to do it yet. And can you imagine the stink if you gave him half a billion dollars or a billion dollars in profit to get him out’?”

Minneapolis’ Children’s Theatre is one of the best in the country. And it has a new home, as designed by the eminent Michael Graves. “The spaces added in the $27 million expansion – a flexible 275-seat theater, a welcoming rotunda, an impressive education center and greatly enlarged backstage facilities – will advance the theater’s enlarged mission and ensure its cultural legacy. But its workmanlike exterior does not advance Twin Cities architecture.”

James Cuno has made an impact in his first year running the Chicago Art Institute. “He has been at the institute just over a year, which once was thought too little time for any head of a major art museum to make felt his or her presence. But recent thinking in the profession has tended toward making changes rapidly during the first year, while a director enjoys the strongest trustee support, and that’s the way a number of former institute curators proceeded in directorships elsewhere, with mixed results.”

The art market is booming, by all accounts. But who are these people that are putting their money into art? “What kind of people are they, the buyers of contemporary art, so different from the recipients of creativity in other fields – neither like the publisher nor the reader of a book, neither like the producer nor the audience of a film, neither like the record company nor the listener to a song?”

Chicago has a distinguished history of great architecture. The city’s contemporary architecure has difficulty competing, so a set of annual awards teases out some of the best. “Do the awards reflect great originality, or even the presence of geniuses among us? Maybe not, but they’re limited by the fact that they honor projects that have been executed; if you’re an architect and your last name isn’t Gehry, many of your best and most original designs are likely to remain unbuilt. And sure, the awards paint a collective portrait of architects who are primarily extending, refining and reinterpreting the tropes of modernism, rather than founding new movements or styles. But they’re doing so with a confident panache that virtually swaggers.”

The Tate has paid £20,000 for a piece of performance art that consists of members of the public asking one another for the time. David Lamelas’ work Time “questions the environment of the museum and static objects”. A photograph of a past performance was included in the price.

“A judge upheld the claim by Japanese company Shirayama Shokusan that the London Saatchi Gallery had continually breached the term of its lease. The judge said Danovo, the firm which runs the gallery, had shown ‘deliberate disregard’ of the owners’ rights.”

The Pompidou is joining up with casino company Harrah’s to develop a new museum in Singapore. “This provides us a unique opportunity to develop/propose a concept to help Singapore enhance its global cultural offering.”

The new director of the Baltic Gallery, the UK’s largest contemporary art space after Tate Modern, is making some changes. “He hopes to instil common sense into the gallery, which until this year lacked simple visitor facilities such as a cloakroom and information desk. ‘We are taking a new approach in our philosophy towards our visitors. The visitors are the reason we are here – with the artist. I was telling our managers earlier today that as a mindset we have to hug each visitor’.”

Christie’s has signed a deal to become the first Western auction house in China. “Under the agreement, settled this week, Christie’s will license its name, provide experts and oversee the entire auction process, from the acquisition of works for sale to the printing and design of the catalog. Its first sale – 45 examples of modern and contemporary Chinese art – is scheduled for Nov. 3 at the Great Wall Sheraton Hotel in Beijing and is expected to bring $10 million.”