Category: visual

A team of curators has been tramping all over New York for the past twn months looking for art that represents the city. “From more than 2,400 submissions, museum directors and curators will choose the work of 175 artists who they say best capture the city’s contemporary art scene for “Greater New York 2005,” a giant survey show opening on March 13 at P.S. 1. For curators, the studio forays are an exercise in discovery – a chance to break away from the routine of organizing exhibitions by proven names. For the artists, they are a nail-biting exercise, not unlike a callback audition for an Off Broadway production.”

“Burning Man’s renowned temple-builder, David Best, was one day from completing a towering art project dedicated to the day laborers in San Rafael’s canal district when the city decided it was all too much. ‘The Chapel of the Laborer,’ a small-scale version of the respected plywood structures that Best builds for the weeklong festival in the Nevada desert and then burns in remembrance of the dead, was to be a temporary sanctuary where Latinos could gather, pray or light a candle for loved ones… But this week the city received a complaint and ordered Best to stop construction immediately. Yellow caution tape now lines the front of the 30- foot-tall structure, and a stop-work order sits near the Virgin Mary’s hand.”

“Interactive displays have been a part of museum and galleries for about two decades but have rarely been successful at augmenting the whole visiting experience… [London’s] National Gallery hopes it can change all that with its new service ArtStart. Visitors can search the entire 2,300-strong collection of the gallery and view pictures that have been digitised on a 100 megapixel camera. The captured images are not displayed in their full glory – that would take up too much storage space – but visitors can zoom in on any section of any painting.”

“Europe’s flagship museums — the Uffizi, the Musee du Louvre in Paris, and the British Museum in London — are feeling the pinch. Thrifty governments facing European Union deficit limits are capping cultural handouts and compelling museums to make money on the side by seeking sponsors, hiring out halls and selling snacks and knickknacks. As a result, even as museums draw record crowds — the Louvre hosted 6 million visitors last year, half the turnout at EuroDisney, Europe’s largest theme park — they increasingly rely on sponsors.”

Art stolen from Seattle galleries that was presumably going to be part of a conceptual show has gallery owners unhappy. “There’s real money involved and real reputations. We reconfigured our space to make sure the front room is always visible to staff and spent a lot of time worrying if we needed a better security system. We felt like saps who couldn’t keep an eye on the art.”

Last summer artwork began disappearing out of galleries and houses in Seattle. Some of it was reported stolen, some not. But it turns out the thefts were part of an art project, an “art show that never happened. The proposed show—called the Repo Show—was to include works by more than a dozen artists, all stolen from galleries and homes by an art collective called Fillistine. The idea, as they described it to us, was to steal the work, then invite the artists to come retrieve it from a local gallery at a one-night, public ‘opening’.”

Neighbors of the Whitney turn up at a public meeting to protest a recently announced expansion plan. But “a well-organized contingent of artists, architects and museum directors who support the expansion, designed by the architect Renzo Piano, countered their arguments. Among them were the painter Chuck Close, the sculptor Mark di Suvero, architects like Maya Lin, and museum directors including Philippe de Montebello of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Glenn D. Lowry of the Museum of Modern Art.”

The big corporate art fairs are a triumph. Of what? Jerry Saltz says start with the money: “Welcome to the branded and marketed art world of 2005. Maybe it’s always been this way, but it’s certainly more so now. These days art fairs are perfect storms of money, marketability, and instant gratification—tent-city casinos where art is shipped in and parked for five days, while spectators gawk as comped V.I.P.s and shoppers roll the dice for all to see. And in this game, everybody plays: artists, dealers, and buyers.”

“Attendance at Chicago’s top 10 museums fell for the fourth year in a row, although the pace of the declined slowed enough that museum officials expect a turnaround this year. In 2004, 7.48 million people visited at least one of the museums, down 1% from 7.57 million in 2003, according to a report released today from the Museums in the Park.”

American collector Carlo Bilotti is working on setting up a centre for contemporary art which will display works by Damien Hirst and other artists from his collection in a former chapel in Rome. “Mr Bilotti says he aims to create a “modern meditative environment” in the chapel which will be modelled on the Rothko chapel in Houston, Texas.”