Category: visual

Like “The Gates” in Central Park, an exhibition of large-scale photographs on Pier 54 in Manhattan is not aimed at procrastinators — and neither is the new museum built to house it. After a three-month run, the show and the museum, designed by Shigeru Ban, will head for California. “The entire museum is to be packed in 37 of the 148 cargo containers that form its checkerboard walls. The temporary structure is composed largely of recyclable materials: the roof and columns are made of paper tubes, the steel containers stacked 34 feet high are used, and a handmade curtain to be suspended from the ceiling is made of one million pressed paper tea bags (used, with the tea leaves removed).”

Hilton Kramer hates the Christo Gates. “My own view is that the gates are nothing less than an unforgivable defacement of a public treasure, and everyone responsible for promoting it—including our publicity-seeking Mayor—should be held accountable, not only for supporting bad taste but for violating public trust. What has to be understood about this whole affair is that it’s not only an assault on nature, but also the wanton desecration of a precious work of art.”

“Banks used to be about ritual and permanence. They resembled Greek or Roman temples, with the banker playing the secular priest, dispensing loans instead of benedictions. Banks inspired awe, though their built-for-the-ages classicism was salesmanship, designed to convince depositors that their money would be safer in the vault than stuffed in a mattress. No more. Now banks want to look like Starbucks, not the Parthenon.” As branch banks approach omnipresence, can their new designs balance customer-friendliness with character?

“The Gates” might have New Yorkers all abuzz, but you might excuse the state of Colorado for wondering what happened to their Christo/Jeanne-Claude project. “In the “artworks in progress” section of the artists’ Web site, the only project listed besides ‘The Gates’ is ‘Over the River,’ a plan to suspend several miles of shimmering fabric panels above a stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado during a summer.” But ever since The Gates hit the front burner, Colorado hasn’t heard a thing from the pair.

Caravaggio’s paintings are hot in the UK right now, thanks largely to a genuine blockbuster exhibition featuring 16 of the master’s surviving works, and even today’s masters of light and perspective are impressed. In fact, a generation of filmmakers counts Caravaggio as a major influence in their work, specifically in the area of light and its effect on a scene.

There is no shortage of blockbuster exhibitions being mounted in London this season, but between the long lines, the timed ticket entries, the crush of tourists, and the packs of gawkers with audioguide headphones plastered to their heads, is anyone really getting a chance to experience the paintings anymore?

“When the makers of a new Channel 4 series on Britain’s ugliest buildings invited viewers to nominate the eyesore they would most like to see demolished they were hardly prepared for a request to flatten an entire town. But civic pride appears to be truly dead and buried in Cumbernauld, a 1950s creation that is home to 52,000 souls 15 miles northeast of Glasgow. Its residents were among the first to contact the programme, begging for dynamite and bulldozer to deliver them oblivion.” The town’s design won architectural awards in the brutalist-besotted 1970s, but the 2003 “Idler’s Book of Crap Towns” called Cumbernauld the second-worst place to live in the UK.

Stagnant since the 1970s, Milan is in the midst of a revitalization that transforms its old industrial sites and sets it up to compete with Paris and Barcelona. “Now, as the city comes to terms with its post-industrial future, a new layer is about to be added to the city bringing in some of the greatest names in 21st-century architecture – Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Arata Isozaki, Massimiliano Fuksas, Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli.” Leading the way is Fuksas’ new Milan Fiera complex, set to open April 2.

Disposable income has increased substantially in Britain, but changes in the ways people spend their money have left the art-and-antiques trade scrambling to find buyers. “The truth is that although many people have money to spare, most are not spending it on art and antiques in the way that perhaps their parents and almost certainly their grandparents would have done. Business at the top end of the art market is still brisk, yet there are problems further down the price scale…. There are fewer collectors.”

If its citizens have their way, an entire town could be destroyed in a new reality-television series, “Demolition,” coming this fall on Britain’s Channel 4. “The series is asking for suggestions of eyesores to be put to death, provoking outrage from many architects. … Of course, it is a bit trite to apply makeover-television ethics to the landscape. But perhaps this series will highlight the inadequacies of a British planning system that so excludes the public.”