Category: visual

Art Basel Miami has become an art sensation in Florida for contemporary collectors. Now Palm Beach wants to the same for Old Masters. First though, to settle on a name: The fair has “changed its name twice in the past two years, the latest version being Palm Beach! America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair. The exclamation mark caused some hilarity in the art market and there were rumours that an outside consultant had been paid $500,000 to come up with the idea. The fair’s organisers deny the latter suggestion and say that it was dreamed up in-house, but there is no doubt about their strategy.”

UK museums are facing a funding crisis with no end in sight. “The reality is that a decade of expansion has left many British museums struggling to pay for running all those shiny new buildings they have only just opened. At the same time, the abolition of admission charges two years ago raised expectations about visitor numbers. The British Museum and the National Gallery both get close to five million a year; the Science Museum has more than two million. Even if these vast numbers remain static, they will be seen as a sign of failure… But to keep the audience coming back each year requires continuous investment.”

“Tens of thousands of objects have just gone completely missing From Iraq in the past two years. It’s a cultural disaster of massive proportions. A senior counterterrorism official said the trade in illicit antiquities was increasingly run by organized rings of professional thieves, who use poor Iraqis in rural areas as diggers. Objects are funneled out of the country in concealed shipments along smuggling routes that have been plied for centuries, in a system in which artifacts are sold for cash or sometimes for weapons that wind up in the hands of insurgents in Iraq. Some archaeological experts estimate that the illegal antiquities trade may pump tens of millions of dollars into the underground economy in Iraq.”

A new museum in the German resort town of Baden-Baden, built to house a private art collection in a setting open to the public, is a low-profile but important architectural triumph from American architect Richard Meier. “Modest in size and appealing in scale, it is quintessential Meier, a condensation of his complex architectural vocabulary into an intensely beautiful pavilion in a park. Visiting it makes one appreciate (again) how stubbornly consistent Meier has been over the past four decades about the means and ends of architecture — and how stupendously good he can be.”

New York businesses are cheering Christo and Jeanne Claude’s The Gates. “City officials said they expected tens of thousands of people to show up for the exhibition, which is to be up for only 16 days, and whose $20 million cost is being borne exclusively by the artists. By the time the 7,500 gates are taken down in two weeks, the city expects to generate $80 million in business, with $2.5 million in city taxes alone, according to the city’s Economic Development Corporation.”

One by one, on a sunny Saturday morning in winter, 7,500 huge ribbons of saffron-colored fabric were released from their bonds and turned New York’s Central Park into a blaze of color, courtesy of the installation artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. “Like all projects by this duo, ‘The Gates’ is as much a public happening as it is a vast environmental sculpture and a feat of engineering… The gates need to be – they are conceived to be – experienced on the ground, at eye level, where, as you move through the park, they crisscross and double up, rising over hills, blocking your view of everything except sky, then passing underfoot, through an underpass, or suddenly appearing through a copse of trees, their fabric fluttering in the corner of your eye.”

New Yorkers are rarely shy with their opinions, and the Gates of Central Park are inspiring plenty of comment from Manhattan’s residents, from gripes about the cost (which is being covered entirely by the artists) to praise for the way the saffron colors have transformed Central Park in winter.

Ed Sozanski was in New York’s Central Park as Christo and Jeanne Claude’s banners were unfurled. “Despite the enormous number of gates, their spacing is such that they never coalesce into a memorable visual force. One perceives hundreds of individual elements instead of an ensemble. Even from a distance – looking across the spacious lawn of the Sheep Meadow, for instance – the effect is fragmented, even slightly chaotic. Only when one is sighting down a curve and the panels elide one into another does The Gates achieve coherence, but those impressions last only a few seconds.”

Construction workers destroyed a large section of the Great Wall of China recently. “Almost 100m of the wall in northern Ningxia autonomous region was levelled in two overnight raids by construction workers who used the material to pave a road. The destroyed area near Zhongwei city was constructed during the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) in an region known as “the Great Wall Museum” because of the profusion of rammed earth sections of the wall.”