Category: visual

Beijing is being totally remade. “A city that, until 1990, had no central business district, and little need of it, now has a cluster of glass towers that look like rejects from Singapore or Rotterdam. And these, in turn, are now being replaced and overshadowed by a new crop of taller, slicker towers, the product of the international caravan of architectural gunslingers that has arrived in town to take part in this construction free-fire zone. Rem Koolhaas, Jacques Herzog, Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvel and Will Alsop are all building, or trying to build here.”

“People who complain about conceptual art always do so on the grounds of craft. Anything that has no painterly or sculptural skill is not art, because anyone could do it. But when people object to individual pieces, it’s almost always because of the subject matter. This has been true since the start of the readymade tradition…”

The New Orleans Museum of Art, which survived Hurricane Katrina intact, has laid off 70 of its 86 staff. “The city-financed museum, which has been shut since the day before Katrina hit in late August, was instructed by the municipal government to keep only a minimal staff needed to administer the institution in its current closed state.”

The museum commemorating the World Trade Center and 9/11 has expanded enormously. “The memorial and its museum have quietly become an $800 million enterprise, $500 million of which must be privately raised. That’s almost five times the figure for the World War II Memorial in Washington, which honored the sacrifice of 400,000 soldiers and the service of some 16 million men and women. The museum alone is bigger than either the Whitney or the Ellis Island museums.”

A plan to try to improve relations between Britain and Morocco has through art has failed after the art offended the Moroccans. “Two of the works, notably an anatomical statement by Tracey Emin, have been withdrawn, while three others by artists including the Chapman brothers have caused offence because of their sexual nature.”

“For one glorious, anarchic moment, it looked as if the Scottish Parliament might win this year’s Stirling Prize, the architects’ award for the best new British building, at exactly the moment the public voted that it was the one building in the country it would most like to see knocked down.”

“For decades now, the architectural mainstream has accepted the premise that cities can exist in a fixed point in historical time. What results is a fairy tale version of history, and the consequences could be particularly harsh for New Orleans, which was well on its way to becoming a picture-postcard vision of the past before the hurricane struck. Now, with the city at its most vulnerable, such voices threaten to drown out all others.”

Two hundred architects and planners gather in Biloxi to talk about rebuilding. “Over the two and a half hours, the participants grappled with priorities: neighborhood rezoning, downtown, museums and culture, casinos, beachfront, road system, building codes, transit development. They knew they could not do it all, but it was hard not to try. The topics addressed were literally all over the Biloxi map.”

This year’s Turner Prize finalists are announced. “The early favourite to win the prize is painter Gillian Carnegie, who creates unsettling versions of traditional styles like still life and landscapes. The other nominees are Darren Almond, Jim Lambie and Simon Starling, who all produce installations. The winner will be announced on 5 December.”

The Italian government case against the Getty is a warning to all museums. “At the center of the case is the reckless youth of the Getty, which opened in the villa in 1974 to fulfill the oil baron J. Paul Getty’s twin obsessions with art collecting and imperial Rome. But the case also presents a paradox, for curator Marion True had gone to considerable lengths to acknowledge the Getty’s past excesses and to cast the museum as a model citizen of the museum and archaeological worlds.” Nonetheless, “Italian officials say that the evidence they have assembled reaches far beyond the Getty. Whether more prosecutions are planned or such warnings are simply intended to force the return of art and deter illicit purchases remains unclear.”