Category: visual

Will Chicago build America’s tallest building? There are plans, of course. Worldwide, the competition for “tallest building” continues. “There are real bragging rights to being the tallest that go back 3,000 years. Exceeding or exalting for spiritual reasons or a demonstration of power dates back from Babylon on – wanting to take a place in history, reserve a place in the timeline. Height is a fixation.”

Christo and Jeanne Claude are pressing forward with their plans to cover part of a Colorado river with fabric. “State, local and federal governments permitting, “Over the River” would occur over two midsummer weeks in 2008, at the earliest, the husband-and-wife team said. Their display, whose seven increments would range from a half mile to 2 1/2 miles long, is designed to be observed from above by motorists on U.S. 50 and from below by hikers and rafters, they said. The fabric is designed to reflect the sky for those watching from above and to diffuse the light when seen from below.”

The Tate Museum has turned down a proposed gift of 160 paintings offered by a group of artists known as the Stuckists. Tate director Sir Nicholas Serota wrote to the Stuckists, who offered the gift: “We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection.”

A member of the Saudi royal family has donated $20 million to the Louvre, with the money earmarked for the construction of a new wing to house the French museum’s collection of Islamic art. The gift is the largest ever received by the Louvre. “The design for the new wing, unveiled at the ceremony, would involve covering much of the Louvre’s Cour Visconti, a neo-Classical courtyard, with a contemporary sail-like roof made up of small glass disks. Officials put the total cost of the wing, by the architects Mario Bellini and Rudy Ricciotti, at $67 million and predicted it would open in 2009.”

Six finalists have been announced for the “£20,000 Stirling prize, awarded for the building that ‘has made the greatest contribution to British architecture in the past year’.” The new Scottish Parliament made the list, as did the Jubilee library in Brighton. The oddsmakers are already cranking, of course, but predicting the Stirling winner has historically been quite difficult. The award will be announced on October 15.

British plans to reroute traffic around Stonehenge and to erect a visitors’ center near the site have been crushed by a local council. Local residents had opposed the plans from the beginning, as had a vocal contingent of Britons with long memories of the last disastrous time the government tried such a scheme.

“The Minneapolis Institute of Arts balanced its $21 million annual budget and raised attendance but saw its membership fall more than 8 percent in the fiscal year that ended June 30. The year was a difficult one in which the museum continued a $50 million expansion designed by architect Michael Graves even as it lost longtime director Evan Maurer, whose resignation for health reasons became effective in February. Maurer, who had been incapacitated much of the previous year, began a leave of absence in September that culminated in his departure after 16 years at the museum’s helm.”

“‘Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre,’ the new exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago, is showing signs of turning into an unexpected blockbuster. About 20,000 people saw the show in the eight days after it opened on July 16… Ticket sales leveled off in the second week, but by the end of the week, about 27,600 people had seen ‘Toulouse-Lautrec’… Box office is so boffo that Art Institute officials are entertaining the possibility that [the show] could substantially exceed its projected attendance of 250,000.”

American artist Wayne Hill thought he was making a fairly plain and obvious statement when he returned from a trip to the Antarctic with two bottles of water melted from the ice shelf, and arranged to exhibit them as a comment on global warming. As it turns out, the work was a bit too subtle for one thirsty visitor, who apparently chugged the lot.

The 2006 edition of the Adelaide Festival will aim to heal the wounds left by the much-maligned 2002 version overseen by Peter Sellars, and the latest thinking appears to be that a merger of art and technology is the best way for the festival to move forward. “It is minimalist, futuristic and, to use one of [festival] director Brett Sheehy’s buzz phrases, ‘reflective of the giga-faceted world in which we live’.”