Category: visual

The Atomic Test Site Museum has opened just off the Las Vegas Strip. “The 8,000-square-foot museum, which opened in March, is the fruit of a decade of work by the Nevada Test Site Historical Foundation. The ticket booth resembles the site’s guard station; the movie theater looks like a bunker. “Countdown to next show,” flashes an ominous red clock. A roar and a blast of air greet visitors in the concrete theater.”

An Vanessa Beecroft art happening at a museum in Berlin featuring 100 naked women caused a commotion at its opening. “Scuffles broke out late last Friday as people tried to jump over the barriers to get closer to the women, aged between 18 and 65, wearing see-through stockings and greased with baby oil, who arranged themselves according to the instructions of US artist Vanessa Beecroft.”

Vanessa Beecroft’s performance in Berlin with 100 naked women is her biggest show ever. Certainly, there is plenty about Beecroft’s work that is voyeuristic. The most interesting aspect of the new work is “its almost calculating cruelty: this evening’s public performance lasts for three hours. Apart from the odd stretch and yawn, the women are instructed to remain as still and silent as possible. Towards the end they can lie down. Yesterday, at the preview, attended by dozens of journalists and TV crews, several of the “girls” as Beecroft calls them sat down exhausted. Most looked distinctly bored.”

Theresa Heinz Kerry (wife of 2004 presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry) surprised the staff and management of Pittsburgh’s Andy Warhol Museum with a $4 million endowment gift this weekend. The donation will go a long way toward helping the museum, “Pittsburgh’s lively, provocative hub of contemporary art and popular culture,” achieve its overall endowment goal of $35 million.

Norwegian police say they’ve taken a man in custody for the theft of two Munch paintings from an Oslo Museum. “A man in his 30s was arrested Friday afternoon … and charged with participating in the armed theft of the Munch Museum on Aug. 24, 2004,” Oslo police said in a statement.

When the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis’s popular avant-garde museum, set out to design a major addition to its building, it wanted the architecture to reflect the center’s commitment to art that doesn’t necessarily fit the traditional mold, but didn’t want a building that would seem out of place in the Walker’s existing neighborhood, which includes idyllic parks, historic churches, and a massive sculpture garden. The new addition, designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, opens next weekend, “the first in a string of high-profile projects among Minneapolis cultural heavyweights to be completed. The Guthrie Theater, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and Children’s Theater complex and a new downtown library with planetarium are all in progress on expansion or relocation efforts of their own.”

“Much of what distinguishes the expanded Walker won’t even be seen by visitors. The complex sits atop an underground labyrinth that includes a 670-stall parking ramp and a network of art storage rooms, frame shops, photo labs and corridors linking the old and new buildings. Huge elevators will carry art from an enclosed loading dock at the south end of the complex to a 14-foot-tall subterranean corridor that parallels Hennepin Avenue. From it, art can be trollied into storage rooms or elevated nine or more stories to the top of the original Walker, one block north.”

“With more than $1 billion being raised for new museums and other arts facilities, Boston is in the midst of an unprecedented cultural boom, one that museum directors hope will elevate the city as a cultural mecca without overbuilding or saturating the market. The construction wave occurs a century after Boston’s major institutions — the Museum of Fine Arts, Symphony Hall, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum — opened their current homes. This time, the projects are more varied, ranging from a contemporary art museum on the waterfront and downtown theaters to a pair of cultural centers slated for open space created by the Big Dig.”

“So just what is wrong with a fake? Certainly not enough to stop forgery becoming a multi-million dollar business. Across Europe, America and Asia, anywhere from 15 per cent to a staggering 80 per cent (in Africa and China) of artworks offered for sale are thought to be fakes. Cases such as the gang of French and Belgian forgers jailed in 2001 for reproducing Cesar’s “compression” sculptures make headlines. And the Impressionist forgers John Myatt or Elmyr de Hory became so well known that their works are sought after because of the forger rather than the forged.”

The art cows could be coming to Edinburgh, home to some pretty great art of its own. “There is no question that they [the cows] have been popular, attracting tourists and generating a buzz. So I’m sure you are wondering what grumpy cow would dismiss a herd that brightens up our streets and gives money to good causes. My problem with this exhibit is that it is one of many banal but inoffensive displays littering our public spaces.”