Category: visual

Big-name architects Rafael Viñoly, Lord Norman Foster, James KM Cheng, Cesar Pelli, and Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates have been enlisted to “design various parts of a $5 billion, 66-acre development in the heart of Las Vegas. Called Project CityCenter, the complex of hotels, casinos, retail and residential space is to be built by November 2009 on a site between the Monte Carlo and Bellagio hotels on the city’s famous strip.”

Trafalgar Square’s vacant fourth plinth gets a new sculpture, a statue of a naked preggnant woman. “The 12ft marble sculpture, ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’, is already dividing opinion among art critics and disability campaigners. Artist Marc Quinn said he had sculpted his friend Ms Lapper because disabled people were under-represented in art.”

British architect David Chipperfield has been chosen to design a major expansion of the St. Louis Art Museum. The expansion will increase space by 40 percent. “The St. Louis Art Museum is bursting at its seams. Strategic acquisitions by the Museum and gifts from local benefactors have created a great collection that cannot be properly shown. Major works by such artists as Matisse and Picasso are confined to storage, and entire collections can only be viewed on a rotating basis. Chipperfield was chosen after a 10-month search.”

After five years of extensive renovations, the Getty villa in Malibu is almost ready to reopen. “The expected 2001 completion date was pushed back repeatedly by legal wrangling with neighbors and construction delays. But the $275-million project — transforming the J. Paul Getty Trust’s former general art museum into an educational center and museum dedicated to the study of the arts and cultures of ancient Greece, Rome and Etruria — is nearly complete. A series of invitational previews this fall will lead to the public opening in early 2006.”

“How important should artistic authorship be in the world of architecture? For most of the last 500 years, imitation was the sincerest form of architectural flattery. The pattern was established during the Renaissance, whose architects were trying to re-create the buildings of ancient Rome. The fact that most of these buildings lay in ruins meant that designers had to do a lot of creative reconstruction, but that didn’t alter the principle of learning from—and copying—the past. Invention was necessary, but it was not the most important factor.”

The Tate has put together mini-collections within its buildings to offer “themed” tours for visitors. “Visitors can also curate their own tours by visiting Tate’s website and selecting paintings according to any theme they choose.”

The Cleveland Museum board has voted to accept bids on a $258 million expansion of the museum. “This is the culmination of 10 years of work, and now it’s a reality. It’s going to happen.” In other news, the museum also says it hopes to name a new director soon.

Ancient shipwrecks in the Mediterranean are being looted of their treasures. “Traffickers have caught on to the fact that there are more than 12,000 shipwrecks in Greek waters. Many of the submerged gems date back to the Golden Age of the fifth century BC. Armed with archeological service maps acquired on the black market, burgeoning numbers of international smugglers have made it their mission to locate the wrecks, authorities say.”

London needs a place to stage architecture exhibitions. The head of the Royal Institute of British Architects Trust says that “most architecture exhibitions are crap. In my opinion, yes they are. The content isn’t crap but the way it engages is appalling because it’s the wrong medium. I’ve seen many architecture exhibitions where the subject matter should be in a book or on a website or in a journal or on television, but it’s not an exhibition.”

Journalist Morgan Fowler has homself “kidnapped” by a performance artist, who beats on him. “Lying on the floor I had felt genuinely degraded, afraid of the next punch, ashamed that I’d submitted to it at all. Yet something like determination kept me submitting to this for a full 40 minutes. Even after a cab home and a shower I found myself oddly reluctant to talk about what had happened. The game had been a little more involving than I had envisaged. I had quite a few bruises.” Is this really art?