Category: visual

Every so often one can feel a perceptible shift in the center of the artworld. “And it is, so the received wisdom has it, about to happen all over again; for there is a country that can – and does – boast 3,000 years of culture, dizzying rates of economic growth and a long-suppressed determination to engage the outside world in its inexorable rise as a global power. Little wonder that all eyes were on China…”

No one will be stealing anything from Oslo’s Munch Museum again. “When the museum reopened Friday after a 10-month security overhaul, several hundred invited guests waited up to a half-hour each to pass through two airport-style metal detectors, an X-ray machine, an optical ticket reader, a turnstile and a double set of one-way security doors. Inside, all of Munch’s pictures were framed behind glass and bolted to the wall. The most significant ones were further protected by an 11-foot-tall partition of thick glass panels positioned 24 inches from the wall and overseen by security cameras and guards. The online version of the newspaper Aftenposten rechristened the museum ‘Fortress Munch’.”

“Pop got its start by making fun of the platitudes that second- and third-generation Abstract Expressionism had settled into, mocking the increasingly popular movement’s increasingly shrill insistence on gestural spontaneity, existential anxiety and psychological authenticity.” But Pop Art has grown up. “Pop and connoisseurship are no longer opposed. Sophistication is not limited to highbrow cultivation but encompasses enthusiasms that cut across classes, arising wherever passion has room to pursue its own ends, on its own terms.”

“In five years, the Cooper-Hewitt has handed trophies and honors to more than 100 of the most creative people in the country. Collectively, they have helped foster a golden age of American design. That matters because design is the new competitive edge in business. It’s also one of the only aspects of modern manufacturing that China doesn’t yet own.” But wait – awards are nice, but shouldn’t the C-H offer an annual exhibition of the best work? After all, isn’t that what Smithsonian museums do?

The Chicago Art Institute is building an enormous addition that will result in the largest museum of contemporary art in Chicago. So where does that leave the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art?

A British citizen has returned an ancient statue to the government of Greece. “Following the fate of so many antiquities during the Nazi occupation, the kouros is believed to have been looted when the Germans bombarded the island in November 1943. After winding up in the possession of a private collector in Switzerland, James Ede’s antiquities firm acquired it earlier this year.”

“In the late 1980s, not yet antique but merely old-fashioned, Lucien Freud was shunned by the museums and his practice seemed to have reached a dead end. And while there are particular circumstances that explain Freud’s resurrection–above all the simple fact of his survival which illogically confers on a career the stamp of authenticity and sincerity–it is also linked to the much remarked upon revival of painting in the last few years.”

Is the painting considered Leonardo’s greatest work, on a wall behind another painting by Vasari? A scientist using sophisticated scanners thinks he’s discovered it. “We looked through Vasari’s painted walls with a low-frequency sonogram machine. On the west wall we found nothing really significant. But on the east wall, beneath the Battle of Marciano, we spotted a 16-centimeter cavity. It is very likely that Vasari created it to protect Leonardo’s work. Amazingly, this hollow space is right under Vasari’s hint ‘seek and you shall find.’ “

The Venice Biennale seems to have taken a very real turn for the better this year, says Sarah Milroy, not least due to its inclusion of far more than the usual number of female artists. “Customarily, these shows are a real mixed bag, flabby, undisciplined affairs bloated with nepotistic inclusions… But in the two leading curated group exhibitions, there is little trace of the usual laziness. Curators Rosa Martinez (at the Arsenale) and Maria de Corral (at the Italian pavilion) have pulled together large shows that feel carefully shaped and are filled with interesting newcomers from around the world to a degree that made the show feel truly global for the first time in my 20 years of attending.”

“The Munch Museum is set to reopen, 10 months after Edvard Munch’s iconic painting The Scream was stolen. The Oslo museum closed in August 2004 after masked thieves pulled the work and another painting, Madonna, off the wall in front of visitors. Police are yet to recover the paintings, despite a reward of two million kroner [$308,210] on offer. A pastel version of The Scream and a lithography of Madonna will be put on display at the museum instead.”