Category: visual

Flat screen high-definition TVs are becoming popular. But there still isn’t a lot of programming to take advantage of the screens. So one company is introducing the GalleryPlayer. “It will allow subscribers to purchase and display high-resolution digital images of “museum-quality” art and photos on their high-definition digital TV displays.”

Istabbul has its first museum of modern art, newly located in a former customs warehouse. “While Turkey has a solid tradition of painting and a lively private gallery scene, the museum could provide a much-needed, stable institutional base, acting as a two-way bridge to Europe and other established centers of Western art.”

Officials in Florence are considering installing machinery that would envelope Michelangelo’s David in a constant stream of air. “The “wall of air” is one of several steps the museum is considering that could protect the statue from dirt particles without encasing it in glass. More than a million tourists are said to visit the statue every year in the Italian city of Florence.”

Installation of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park has begun. “The $20 million project, a quarter-century in the making and financed by the artists, will go on full view on Feb. 12 and remain until Feb. 27. It is expected to attract thousands of art lovers from around the world. The artists are trying to create “a visual golden river appearing and disappearing through the bare branches of the trees, highlighting the shapes of the footpaths,” according to a brochure explaining the project. The color was chosen to cast a warm glow over the park at a gray time of year.”

Is 2005 the start of a new era in art? “We don’t have art movements any more, for one thing. We have market movements. In the place of successive modernist and post-modernist esthetic revolutions — now decades in the past — we have fads and collector enthusiasms, things like Japanese anime, Chinese photography and the new Leipzig painters. Such developments are symptoms of a fallow, second- and third-generation period, and at the same time indicate new levels of competition in the continuously expanding, robust international art market.”

The Victoria and Albert Museum suffered a series of losses to its collection that went unnoticed for decades, say records in the National Archives. “The thief, a man called Nevin, stole 2,544 items from the museum, prompting a security report in 1954. A subsequent stock-take revealed about 5,000 objects were missing, although not all were attributable to Nevin.”

A proposed levy in the European Union would grant a resale tax on every resold piece of art. “The measure will give artists, and their descendants for 70 years after their deaths, claims upon a levy imposed every time one of their works is resold. Very fair, some will say. Yet in practice, it will simply cause owners of contemporary art to send works for sale in markets where the levy is not applied, notably Switzerland and the US.”

Stolen religious art is big business in Mexico and all over Latin America. “Churches, convents and shrines all over Latin America are under siege. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in Washington and the FBI, which will soon unveil a “rapid response” task force to fight trafficking in smuggled art, say they are beefing up enforcement efforts. A key tactic is monitoring the Internet, where much of the loot is sold.”

“Art made from obviously impermanent materials that is being painstakingly preserved; art made to stay shiny and new that is being treasured for its age; art challenging the notion of originality that is being scrutinized for that quality; once-standard, off-the-shelf materials that are now hard to find; collectors who cling to a piece of paper that proves their dated light fixture is worthy of a museum, not a recycling bin; and caretakers of a reputation who make decisions that they readily admit run counter to the artist’s original intentions. Such is the strange afterlife of work that produces beauty from the banal, an object lesson in how the legacy of a strong-willed radical can be brought to heel by an even stronger force, the market.”