Category: visual

Banksy’s recent caper hanging paintings in four New York museums has those museums worried about security. But “what makes Banksy’s exploits effective as attention-getters, however, is the degree to which he uses the tools of the curators against them. His paintings had ornate frames and the plaques that accompanied them mimicked those found in galleries. ‘He’s using their language, their style of presentation’.”

Leaders in the UK visual arts world are banding together for a manifesto it is hoped will “transform the arts”. “Arts leaders, bitterly disappointed that the Government has failed to follow through on its early investment in culture, have pledged to force politicians to accept that the public has a right to art. They are hoping that the united front, from a sector that has traditionally been fragmented, will place arguments about cultural entitlement firmly on the agenda for this election, for future spending rounds and beyond.”

Museum shops have become an increasingly important source of income. “The Metropolitan has long been the leader in museum marketing. Last year, sales at its 20 gift shops around the country generated $80 million of its $260 million in revenue. But as the bling binge soars, others are following suit, promoting jewels in shops, catalogs and on the Web.”

Museums are increasingly turning to branding experts to redefine their image. “There’s a realization that museums need to understand what the world thinks of them. Art is a code that can and should be broken and museums are not always good at communicating that code to the outside world,” he said. “It’s a translation process. We’re the interpreters. We’re not writing the script, but helping articulate the message.”

“In the world of politics, power is pretty upfront: you argue; you face off; you declare war. In culture, the playing out is subtler, but can be, in its way, no less ruthless and devastating. By excluding certain kinds of objects, or by presenting them as relics of a dead past, a museum can degrade a culture just as surely as time and weather can. Fortunately, a museum can also reverse this process. And that has been happening, sometimes with vigor, sometimes with foot dragging, in America over the last 20 years. Whatever the motivating trend – call it postmodernism, pluralism, multiculturalism – the status of non-Western art is beginning to change in mainstream institutions, including sleeping giants in New York like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the recently repackaged Museum of Modern Art, from obscurity to varying degrees of prominence.”

Rem Koolhaas’s design for the theatre that will anchor Dallas’s grand new Performing Arts Center has undergone its first round of retooling, and the results are impressive, says David Dillon. “The Wyly looks like nothing in the Arts District, or anywhere else for that matter, which is just fine with the adamantly acontextual Mr. Koolhaas. He likes buildings that are mysterious and hard to place, that might be anything and anywhere.”

A small Renoir painting valued at about 200,000 euros has been stolen from the auction house Tajan in Paris. “The theft of the artwork, entitled Tête de fillette (Head of a little girl), happened while it was displayed in a room of the auction house and not by breaking and entering the premises as police first reported.”

A new play running in Boston focuses on what outsiders might consider an unlikely profession when it comes to the creation of dramatic sparks: art authentication. Of course, the play isn’t exactly an accurate depiction of the authetication business, any more than architects’ lives resemble that of Indiana Jones, but the production does call attention to a little-known, but vitally important, corner of the art world, and sheds some light on the rivalries and internal politics that can affect it.

The City of Chicago is preventing artists from taking photos of the Anish Kapoor “Bean” sculpture in the middle of the park, saying that as public art, it owns rights to images of the work as well as the work itself. “According to attorney Henry Kleeman, who negotiated with park artists on the city’s behalf, Chicago bought a ‘perpetual paid-up license to reproduce the artwork for commercial purposes.’ So only the city or its concessionaires may legally sell pictures of the Bean.”

“The Cleveland Museum of Art has postponed indefinitely a major international exhibition scheduled for 2006 because other museums sharing the show couldn’t afford terrorism insurance for artworks valued at more than $1 billion. The decision highlights an open secret in the art world: With art prices skyrocketing and insurance premiums rising to meet them, it’s becoming harder for art museums to sustain the flow of blockbusters that have been a fixture of American cultural life for decades.”