Category: visual

Robert Hughes writes that Richard Serra is one of Amer’ica’s three greatest sculptors. Ever. In fact, Hughes says, Serra’s new installation at Guggenheim Bilbao makes Gehry’s architecture seem pale by comparison. “Let’s come right out with it: on the basis of his installation of one old and seven new rolled steel sculptures at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, we can call Richard Serra not only the best sculptor alive, but the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century.”

New York’s Museum of Art & Design is planning to reclad and renovate a modernist structure on Columbus Circle to serve as its new home, but the World Monuments Fund is protesting, arguing as part of its new list of endangered architectural sites that “the 1964 building represents a turning point in Modernist design. In an era of growing calls for the preservation of Modernist architecture, the 2006 watch list includes nine 20th-century sites.”

Two major events in the art world this month – Art Basel and the Venice Biennale. But though one’s a commercial art fair and the other’s an “aesthetic” exercise, they’re not so different. “While Venice is about discovering and appreciating new art and is ostensibly aloof from the market, commercial interests are never too far from the surface. Reputations are made and deals are done behind the scenes that impact directly on the market. Basel, on the other hand, is unquestionably about money, but aspires more and more to be about culture and education, to be like a biennale.”

The Delaware Art Museum reopens after a major expansion. “The museum has been closed for three years for a complicated renovation and expansion that not only increases its capacity by two-thirds, but also dramatically reorients the building on its 11-acre site. One of the region’s premier smaller museums, it generally specializes in American art and illustration, including major collections of work by illustrator Howard Pyle and realist painter John Sloan.”

How do museums set salaries for their directors? That’s what Tacoma News-Tribune reporter Jen Graves wants to know after noting that the small Museum of Glass: International Center for Contemporary Art has paid its director $282,000 in salary and $34,000 in benefits. The median museum director salary in the Western United States is $188,000. “At the Philadelphia Museum of Art, an operation roughly 10 times the size of MoG and with $280 million in net assets, the director makes $267,245.” So what has the glass museum got for its money from its departing director?

A new book details the cultural history of Iraq and its pillaging. “Conceived as an educational tool and a plea for help, the book offers a history of the region and its art, as well as an account of the devastation that occurred in April 2003, when looters ran rampant through the museum in Baghdad.”

“The name of Arup rings through postwar architecture like a subsonic rumble. This extraordinary firm has had a largely invisible hand in many of the iconic structures of the past 50 years, from the Sydney Opera House through the Pompidou Centre, James Frazer Stirling’s Stuttgart Art Gallery, Norman Foster’s Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, right up to the Swiss Re Tower and the London Eye. If you’ve got a huge or difficult project to sort out, like a bridge or a skyscraper or an airport, Arup is one of the few companies to turn to.”

Have prices for contemporary art peaked, after super-heating in recent months? Art Basel sales suggest they may be… “Younger art was making all the noise. Now, there’s a bit of a shift to postwar art. At these price levels, collectors are becoming more conservative.”

An auction of paintings by Congo the chimpanzee have sold at auction in London for more than $25,000. “Congo, born in 1954, produced about 400 drawings and paintings between ages 2 and 4. He died in 1964 of tuberculosis. The three abstract, tempera paintings were auctioned at Bonhams in London alongside works by impressionist master Renoir and pop art provocateur Andy Warhol. But while Warhol’s and Renoir’s work didn’t sell, bidders lavished attention on Congo’s paintings.”

Any chance of making something meaningful of the Ground Zero memorial in Lower Manhattan is all but faded. “As the wrangling over the nearby Freedom Tower has shown, nothing here goes smoothly. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is quietly pushing to wrap up plans for the memorial by mid-July. But after two and a half years of tinkering, the city is likely to end up with a memorial geared to tourists with short attention spans rather than to the serious contemplation of human loss. Worse, the constant revisions continue to gobble up space for the living, threatening to transform the site into a theme park haunted by death.”