Category: visual

What is with contemporary art’s fascination with disposable art? “Our age is obsessed with the glory of spent materials: we love scattered detritus, piles of old tyres, dirty beds surrounded with rubbish. The Young British Artist is part of a dumbshow now, each of them a performer too hung up on the joke of disposability, too unintelligent about language and image to avoid becoming poster campaigns for their own boredom.”

An annual survey of churches in the UK shows that many are being shut and abandoned. “One survey estimates that the rate of newly redundant churches will double to 60 a year, as a result of dwindling attendance and changing centres of population.” So what can be done with the buildings? “Centuries ago the naves of many churches were used as meeting halls, as places where local business took place, or simply where people went on a daily basis to gossip and exchange views. ‘I see no reason why the naves of many churches cannot function in the same way today – almost as a parish hall. Let us let the people back in’.”

“With its yearly sales now reaching an estimated $10 billion in the United States alone, art has quite literally become big business. While money invested in the stock market’s S&P 500 Index — a conservative bet on Wall Street’s top 500 companies — has earned an annualized 11 percent return over the past decade, that same money sunk into the contemporary art market would have produced a whopping 29 percent return.”

A new award is being launched in Britain for public sculpture. It’s intended to focus good will on the country’s public art – much of which has been vandalized or neglected. “The background is a dismal inventory, gradually being revealed as the association compiles a national register of all the public sculptures in the UK, of the ignored, abused or trashed works of art scattered across the country.”

After important Bible-era fakes were proven so in an Israeli museum, experts have sent out a call to other museums to be on the lookout for more. “Scholars said the forgers were exploiting the deep emotional need of Jews and Christians to find physical evidence to reinforce their faith. ‘This does not discredit the profession. It discredits unscrupulous dealers and collectors’.”

How do you make fake ancient religious objects good enough to fool experts? It’s not really so difficult…

Why would famed art critic John Ruskin claim to have made a bonfire of JMW Turner drawings if he didn’t? “In an essay in the British Art Journal Ian Warrell argued that there are many reasons why Ruskin might have claimed the destruction: his undoubted utter shock at the discovery that his hero had feet and other working body parts of clay; his dismay at the scandalous allegations in a biography of Turner he had backed; and, crucially, the introduction of the first Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which provoked paranoia about art images and anxiety that curators could be prosecuted for works in gallery collections.”

For the third time in three months, the Victoria & Albert Museum has been hit by robbers. “The museum authorities disclosed yesterday that a series of Italian Renaissance bronze plaquettes, worth about £500,000, were stolen on Wednesday. The theft is the largest of the three robberies and a big embarrassment for the V&A, which, The Times revealed last month, has been severely criticised for its lax security.”

With so much exciting new art in the world, not to mention the emergence of technology-based art, why did the old and familiar continue to dominate at North America’s biggest museums in 2004? “A youth movement? As if. The biggest news in the art-auction world — often confused with real art-making, or the real world for that matter — was that sale prices by the likes of Mark Rothko and Jasper Johns, artists in their prime way more than 50 years ago, have finally caught up with the mega-bucks sales by the Impressionists… The problem is no one really wants to be on edge. In this country, art is treated like comfort food for the brain.”

Canadian museums have been struggling in recent years to create exhibitions that will both generate an immediate buzz and have the longevity to make their mounting worthwhile financially. In 2004, a number of major exhibitions hit the mark, and the key to future successes may be in the trans-Atlantic partnerships which were forged this year. By joining forces with European institutions, Canadian museums “were able to split the costs of research and development of the loan list, the shipping, the catalogue production and a host of other costs that could have sunk the exhibition.”