Category: visual

The UCLA art student who last year faked his suicide with a gun he had carved out of wood has come forward to tell his story. “Deutch, now 26, also knew that gunplay could upset fellow students and get him in trouble with campus authorities. But in his first comments on the incident, he says he never dreamed, as he got up to perform in UCLA’s graduate art annex in Culver City, that his phantom gunshot would ricochet and cause the departure of two UCLA professors, roiling the campus for several months.”

A trip through this summer’s Venice Biennale makes you dispair of the whole idea, writes Jerry Saltz. “After a show like this it’s tempting to say that biennial culture is over, that these fetes are too big, baggy, and bureaucratic to reflect the state of art. By now it’s unclear who they’re for: The several hundred thousand who come to see them or the several thousand from the art world. Yet, just when they seem dead, a new age of biennials looms. In roughly 700 days, starting early June 2007, a kind of Harmonic Convergence of super exhibitions is slated to take place when the Venice Biennale, Documenta XII, and the Munster Sculpture Project will open one after the other.”

Earlier this year the Guggenheim’s biggest benefactor left the museum’s board amid allegations that the Goog’s financial house was crumbling. A memo spells out just how crumbly…

“A successful Olympics is measured not just by the gold medal tallies, the firework displays that accompany the opening ceremonies or the receipts from the television rights and the sponsorship money, but most conspicuously by what it leaves behind. With its soaring roof rising out of the Yoyogi park, Kenzo Tange’s Olympic pool for the Tokyo Games is still a landmark 40 years after it was built. It served to mark Japan’s coming of age as a modern state after post-war reconstruction. And Frei Otto’s stadium in Munich – despite the horror of the assassination of the Israeli athletes at 1972 Olympics – is a magical structure. Its elegant tent-like roofs are so popular that there was an outcry when there was a move to demolish it. But in the case of Montreal, and now sadly Athens too, the Olympic legacy is mainly seen in the form of debt.”

Famous buildings are celebrated for their style, even as pieces of art. But what is it like to actually work inside a celebrity structure?

It’s only taken 4,500 years, but the quarry from which the stones for Stonehenge were taken in 2,500 BC has been found. “Archaeologists have long suspected that the bluestones, which form Stonehenge’s inner circle, came from the Preseli Hills, but no evidence of a quarry had been found in the area. Darvill and Wainwright report that geochemical analysis show that the rock formations at the prehistoric quarry are identical to those at Stonehenge.”

“Sixty-five years ago many of London’s art treasures were moved north and stored in a remote slate mine to protect them during World War II. These included works by artists such as Titian, Michelangelo and Constable. After the war ended, the 2,000 works were returned intact. Many of the pieces even arrived home in a better condition, preserved and improved by the humidity and low temperatures inside the mine.”

“James Cuno is among a growing number of museum directors who have grown queasy at the way the “major” temporary exhibition has become a nearly annual fixture at art institutions like the Chicago Art Institute. Yes, blockbusters create excitement, draw huge crowds and massive media hype — all of which gives museums chances to shine and, oh by the way, earn wads of cash from increased concessions and memberships. But at what cost? Through the ’90s, there was too much emphasis on temporary exhibitions because they came to dominate the museum’s activity and, worse, people’s expectations of the museum.”

For three-quarters of a century, the lonely farm couple depicted in Grant Wood’s ubiquitous painting, “American Gothic,” have called Chicago’s downtown Loop home, an incongruous base of operations for such a distinctly rural pair. But this fall, in a rare case in which the Art Institute of Chicago has consented to lend out one of its prized works, the painting will be going “home” to Iowa for a special Wood retrospective at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. It may be just another painting in Chicago, but Iowa is already abuzz with talk of the return.

What are we to make of an artist who crafts a bar of soap from fat liposuctioned out of the Italian prime minister, sells it to a collector for $18,000, then claims that his work has no political overtones? “There is something vexing about Gianni Motti and his bar of soap. It could be a neat contemporary commentary on politics, the media, image-consciousness and postmodern portraiture – and therefore worthy of its plexiglass pedestal. Or it could just be a tasteless, overpriced idea that dissolves in seconds, like soap in a hot bath.”