Category: visual

Rachel Whiteread’s new installation of 14,000 white boxes in Tate Modern’s massive Turbine Hall was one of the most anticipated new works of art to hit London this year. Of course, no one knew what it would look like until yesterday, but hey, buzz is buzz. Still, Whiteread was deeply worried that the simplicity of the design would cause the notoriously fickle British arts press to jump on her, and is well aware that a backlash could still happen. “I don’t think it’s going to be like a room full of cardboard boxes. It’s going to be a room, I would imagine, full of light and space and built elements, and you’ll figure out what they are, but it might take a bit of time to do that. It’s going to be a spectacle, and theatrical, and it has to be.”

“London’s Tate Gallery used to be famous for its perverse refusal to collect or exhibit photography. Photography could only darken its doors as an auxiliary medium… All that has changed, probably in a deliberate attempt to stake a position in the shifting balance of power as Britain’s photographic institutions finally edge painfully towards sorting themselves out. There are new photographic museums afoot in Britain (not a moment too soon) and Tate wants a piece of the action. Its record on photography has been dreadful. Now it is performing a spectacular volte-face.”

Vincent Van Gogh’s pen-and-ink drawings are every bit as astonishing and expressive as his famous paintings, yet amazingly, there has never been a major U.S. exhibition of the drawings. That changes this week, when New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art puts 113 Van Gogh drawings on exhibit. The works have been borrowed from various public and private collections, and will likely not be seen in public again anytime soon, due to the relative fragility of pen-and-ink works.

“The French government wants to turn a disused Renault car factory on an island in the River Seine west of Paris into a major European centre for artists, featuring workshops, homes and galleries, the prime minister said yesterday… The site was to have hosted a prestigious museum to house the collection of one of France’s richest men, Francois Pinault, until he pulled out in May, blaming red tape.”

“The most stupendous overmantel in Europe, a sensuous masterpiece by Rubens showing the sleeping Samson sprawled across the lap of his beautiful but treacherous Delilah, may soon be displayed in the room for which it was originally painted. The 17th century painting now lives in London at the National Gallery, which is gathering up loans of Rubens paintings for a major exhibition opening at the end of this month. However, the gallery is considering loaning it back next year to the Rockox House Museum in Antwerp, home of Rubens’s friend Nicolaas Rockox.”

Britain’s Tate Modern museum has unveiled a massive new work of installation art by Turner-winning sculptor Rachel Whiteread consisting of 14,000 identical white boxes. The work, aptly named “Embankment,” was commissioned specifically for the Tate’s enormous Turbine Hall, which measures 500 feet in length with a 115-foot ceiling. So what do 14,000 white boxes look like? Rather like a bunch of oversized piles of sugar cubes, as it turns out.

The UK’s Stirling Prize for architecture is to be awarded this week. “Beyond the difficulty of choosing between this year’s nominees, something about the prize that aspires to do for buildings what the Man Booker does for books, and the Turner does for art, fails to add up. The real problem faced by the Stirling Prize since its launch in 1996 has been its failure to come up with a coherent sense of what the award is for, and then to stick with it.”

The Tate St. Ives Gallery is very successful. So now the museum wants to expand (naturally). But “more than 2,000 local people have signed a petition against the expansion plans, many of them believing the gallery is losing touch with the town. Some protesters object because the proposed creative centre, which the gallery and Cornwall county council want built on land above the existing building, would mean a loss of views and car parking spaces.”

The latest sculpture to be added to London’s Trafalgar Square is not your typical model of a modern major general. “Alison Lapper Pregnant – juxtaposed as it is with the majestic figures of a king, two generals and the naval hero Lord Nelson – has fueled a sharp discussion here about art, the purpose of public monuments, and the appropriateness of displaying such a piece in such a singular public space.”

Arizona museum directors are taking a more serious attitude about running like businesses. They have to. They have expanded so much in recent years that “we’ve created a new museum here every five or six years.” “A national debate over the desired skill set for directors has been rekindled with job searches under way at more than 15 major art museums across the country, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.”