Category: visual

For a second time, Boston’s Museum of Fine Art has “rented” some of its artwork to a casino gallery in Las Vegas. Why should anyone care? “The MFA’s rental deals are wrong for lots of ethical and moral reasons,” writes Tyler Green…

“Called bioart or wetware by some of its practitioners, the field is growing rapidly in the United States and Europe, and it is producing bizarre and sometimes disturbing work that seems sprung right from the pages of Philip K. Dick or Koji Suzuki, except that the science involved is not fiction. In many ways bioart represents a logical next step in contemporary art, which has eagerly embraced new approaches and nontraditional materials: video and computers beginning in the 1960’s and 70’s, digital technology and the Internet in the 90’s. But bioart can credibly claim to have made a more revolutionary break with tradition.”

One Los Angeles Frank Lloyd Wright house renovated, another falling down a hill. “If only it were that simple. It turns out that Ennis-Brown, once you get past the gaping holes on its lower flank, looks surprisingly good, particularly its stunning split-level living and dining room space — though that shouldn’t dissuade you from making a donation to help shore it up. And at the Barnsdall House, the handsome renovations can’t disguise the dispiriting mess the city has made, and continues to make, of its site or that behind its low walls is one of Wright’s least appealing domestic interiors.”

Where is money for Denver’s new $20 million Clyfford Still Museum goinbg to come from? “People have been waiting and wondering what was going to happen with the Still estate for years and years. And I think the news it is going to land safely some place as prominent as Denver is going to be greeted not only with a huge sigh of relief from the international art crowd but also an expectation of something great.”

Blair Kamen adds his voice to those criticizing the latest plans for the WTC Freedom Tower. “The problems, evident in almost every aspect of the rebuilding, threaten to undermine the carefully conceived balance between remembrance and renewal that was the hallmark of Daniel Libeskind’s brilliant, competition-winning master plan. What they add up to is death by a thousand cuts rather a single mortal blow — and the danger that unless public officials here stop their blather about everything going smoothly, the rebuilt ground zero will turn out to be a whittled-down version of Libeskind’s plan rather than a sparkling realization.”

The design of Toronto’s new opera house is… well… pretty dull. “There’s nothing wrong with the new complex, but instead of something spectacular, it is polite, well mannered, deferential, even self-effacing. That would be fine if it were anything else, but this is, after all, an opera house, not a downtown shopping centre. What is opera if not spectacle?”

Charles Saatchi, long a champion of Brtish artists, is presenting a show without any homegrown talent. “Saatchi last omitted British artists from an exhibition in the 1987 New York Now show in his north London gallery.”

“Cultural buildings in the United States are being supersized, with newly enlarged museums opening this year in cities including Minneapolis, Indianapolis, and Davenport, Iowa.” Why? It’s competitive out there. “Jazzing up older edifices is one way institutions can stay competitive at a time when millions of tourists are flocking to museums of every kind. Recent estimates of visits to US museums – including zoos and historical sites – range from 640 million to 865 million annually.”

A new museum devoted to the work of Paul Klee and designed by Renzo Piano, opens in Bern, Switzerland. “Along with presenting the world’s largest collection of Klee works, however, the new center also promises what it calls a “Klee experience,” including concerts by a newly formed Paul Klee Ensemble, and theater productions with décor evocative of Klee’s work. Children are invited to their own museum, Creaviva, while every summer a dozen or so young international artists will join academics, curators and critics at a 10-day seminar here.”

“The Mexican government has issued a series of stamps depicting a dark-skinned Jim Crow-era cartoon character with greatly exaggerated eyes and lips, infuriating black and Hispanic civil rights leaders for the second time in weeks. Mexican postal officials said the five-stamp series features Memin Pinguin, a character from a comic book created in the 1940s, because he is beloved in Mexico. A spokesman for the Mexican Embassy described the depiction as a cultural image that has no meaning and is not intended to offend.”