Category: visual

Despite great progress for women artists, the going has been slow. And how about that list of Britain’s greatest art that didn’t include work by a single woman? “It seems that women’s art that doesn’t conform to preconceived notions of feminine loveliness still has a hard time gaining acceptance. That means we can’t be complacent about where women’s art will stand for posterity, and how a list of favourite paintings will look in 50 years’ time.”

Aboriginal art now accounts for more than 50% of all art sales in Australia, and there were big expectations that a work by the late Rover Thomas, would become the first indigenous painting to sell for more than $1 million (Aus). Instead, the painting has failed to sell at auction.

Why do so many artists make self portraits? And “what do historical self-portraits do? They concentrate into a single powerful icon not just the appearance of humanity but its feeling, what it is to possess “a self”. A sustained self-scrutiny: partly what the artist feels they really are and partly what society pressurises them to be.”

Scientists have found the exact spot where marble for Michelangelo’s David was quarried. “Until now, art historians knew only that the large block came from the Carrara quarries in Tuscany, which still produce many types and qualities of marble. Analysts have now used three tiny samples, retrieved from the second toe of the left foot of David when the figure was damaged in act of vandalism in 1991, to track down the marble’s origin. Not only were they able to determine the exact spot of excavation, they also found that Michelangelo’s marble is of mediocre quality, filled with microscopic holes, and likely to degrade faster than many other marbles.”

In 2001 Tony Blair loaned George W Bush a bronze bust of Winston Churchill to put in the Oval Office. “The British government’s huge hidden collection is held inside an anonymous underground storehouse in Soho and contains around 12,000 works of art (five times more than the National Gallery owns). The curators are given £200,000 a year to buy new pieces and the art is available for government ministers to request for display in their private offices. It is also sent out all over the globe to foreign embassies and consulates. Intended as a showcase for British cultural life, the work has always stayed inside property owned by Britain. Until, that is, March 2001, when Blair’s officials requested the President of the US should be loaned a bust of the British war-time premier.”

“Copying in architecture is at least as old as tracing paper. Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia was an effort to import Palladio’s neo-Roman vision to the New World. And the first United States copyright act, passed in 1790, made no provision for architecture. It wasn’t until 200 years later, in 1990, that the United States added buildings to the list of things – including movies, books and recordings – that qualify for copyright protection. But even among architects with instantly recognizable styles, it’s rarely possible to state with certainty which similarities result from direct imitation and which are coincidental.”

The differences between the first visit of King Tut to America and the second are instructive. Both visits served political goals. But “the Cold War is long since over, and the technique of cultural diplomacy that characterized the era has withered as a Washington pastime. Instead, corporatism is the new driving force. The change from public sponsorship to corporate packaging mirrors the political sea change in the U.S. between 1979, when Tut 1 finished its blockbuster national tour, and 2005. It brackets the Reagan-Bush era and the decline of liberal democratic ideals and the rise of corporatist political philosophy.”

Terry Teachout has tried to like the new Museum of Modern Art. But he’s decided it won’t happen. “The exaggerated scale of the building swamps the art it contains, and the austere décor is so rigidly uniform in its self-conscious simplicity as to make the museum seem even bigger than it is. As if to compensate—which it doesn’t—most of the galleries are as overstuffed with paintings as they are overcrowded with people, making it impossible to concentrate on any one work with anything remotely approaching ease. And while I’m hardly the first person to remark on the mall-like character of the new MoMA, I found it even more oppressive this time around.”

“It remains at the center of one of World War II’s most enduring mysteries: Hitler’s intended National Socialist museum of art in the Austrian city of Linz was a dream that was never fully realized by the Führer although many thousands of art works were obtained for the project. Speculation has always surrounded the origins of the dictator’s collection but since the war ended, this has only intensified as experts attempt to discover where many of the works disappeared to.”

Many waterfront cities have…well, blighted waterfronts. “How to reclaim all that wasted property? There are plenty of models: the self-consciously quaint shopping mall at Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, slowly turning into a dilapidated relic; the strip of skater heaven along the Hudson River; the maritime Pacific Bell stadium in San Francisco; the harborside courthouse in Boston. Everyone with a slice of waterfront to save, however modest, should also make a pilgrimage to the North Fork village of Greenport, where Mayor David Kapell’s decade-long quest to restore a patch of bayside blight has finally come to fruition.”