Category: visual

How do you build a memorial to a tragedy? How can you properly commemorate human deaths while also creating something enticing enough to draw spectators? New York is struggling with this problem at Ground Zero, of course, and Christopher Knight has spotted a textbook example of what not to do: Berlin’s new Holocaust memorial. “Your mind knows that the place is supposed to confuse and disorient. It creates a theatrical sense of slowly enveloping claustrophobia and entrapment, meant to parallel the rising tide of Nazism 70 years ago. But you never feel it in your body. Walking among the tombstone-like shafts, there is no sense of threat. Menace is absent. Absurdity begins to loom.”

Baltimore’s new Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture was a long time coming, and organizers struggled to insure that their vision would stand out from the crowd. “The architects’ challenge was to create a building that fits into the urban context but stands out enough to convey how unusual it is. They responded with a boldly modern building that makes the most of its tight but prominent site. Then they imbued the building with layers of meaning that help tell what’s inside. The design doesn’t make literal references to African architecture. Its strength lies in the use of architectural symbolism – through colors, forms and materials – to create a building that avoids cliches but is undeniably African-American in spirit.”

In preparing to erect an obelisk being returned from Italy to Ethioipia, workers have found at the ancient site of Axum a series of underground chambers and arcades near the original position of the obelisk, beneath an area converted into a parking lot in 1963.

A Francis Bacon painting has sold at auction for £4.9 million, “a new record for the artist. Portrait of George Dyer Staring into a Mirror reached the price at a Post-War and Contemporary Art auction by Christie’s on Thursday. The 1967 painting, sold to a private collector from Europe, had only been expected to sell for up to £3.5m.”

There is a relationship, but does one describe the other? “The notion was to take the novelty of abstract art, so radical before World War I that it could hardly be imagined, and justify it by comparison to music. If a Beethoven string quartet could be understood and admired on its own terms, without imagining that it painted a sonic picture of the world, visual art should have the same freedom to escape from rendering reality. The notes and timbres and structures of music could be compared to the colors and textures and forms of a painting; a talented artist could assemble them into a visual “composition” every bit as affecting, meaningful and praiseworthy as anything that goes on in a fancy concert hall.”

For the first time, the World Monuments Fund has listed an entire country as endangered. It’s Iraq, and the country joins other threatened sites from 55 countries that include a Modernist building in New York and a hut in Antarctica. “The list of 100 at-risk sites, issued by the privately financed World Monuments Fund every two years, is chosen from nominations made by a broad array of experts in archeology and the arts.”

A British court has ruled that photographer David Hamilton’s “multi-million-selling images of young, naked women and girls are officially branded as indecent in a landmark British ruling. Anyone owning one of his coffee-table books now risks being arrested for possession of indecent photographs, following a ruling at Guildford Crown Court.
Hamilton’s photographs have long been at the forefront of the ‘is it art or pornography?’ debate.

“Archaeological sites in southern Iraq have been systematically looted for more than two years, but experts say the dig will have to go much deeper to find out where thousands of lost artefacts have ended up. The complete lack of knowledge is devastating. One article said that a billion Iraqi dinars worth of artefacts had been smuggled to Syria, but that’s absurd. We just don’t know what’s gone.”

Why did anyone ever think building a stadium in Manhattan was a good idea, asks Ada Louise Huxtable. “A stadium should never–repeat, never–be built on the midtown Manhattan waterfront; this is a flagrant violation of everything we know about urban land use. It is axiomatic that you do not put industrial-size blockbusters in uniquely desirable locations; they destroy an enormous potential for profit and pleasure while denying access to one of the city’s most valuable amenities. Located next to the convention center, the stadium would have doubled the mass and length of the huge bunker against the river already established by that “lump of black coal”–as essayist Phillip Lopate described its dark bulk in his literary trip around the edges of Manhattan–cutting off views and access with nearly a mile of hulking wall.”

The Guggenheim continues its expansionist appetite. But former board member Peter Lewis says there is more to expansion than met the eye. “In speeches, it was, ‘We’re the museum of the future.’ It was sold that sort of way,” he says. In fact it was driven by the need for revenue. “The rationale always was, ‘We had a nongenerous, noncontributing set of trustees–therefore we had to have other sources of revenue and capital–that’s why we must expand. It’s not the Guggenheim–it’s the Guggenheim merchandising the Bilbao effect.”