Category: visual

“The Royal Academy of Arts, the body that has represented Britain’s leading artists for more than 200 years, is facing a grave financial crisis. Its splendid corridors are riven with talk of plots and bad management, and unless it scores another blockbusting hit with the ‘Turks’ exhibition, to be staged next year, it may have to sell more of its assets. A new president will be elected on Tuesday, in Vatican-style seclusion, inside the academy’s stately home, Burlington House in London’s Piccadilly. But when the 80 academicians on the general assembly have made their decision, their newly anointed leader will become the figurehead of an organisation saddled with potentially crippling money problems.”

A historic exhibition of 18 works by Caravaggio is drawing crowds in Naples, further cementing the realist master’s reputation as one of the greatest painters of all time. “The reason for the success of this magnificent show has less to do with numbers than with the quality of the works and the period that they document: the last four years of Caravaggio’s life, spent peripatetically outside Rome, where he had made a name for himself before he died at 39 of malaria.”

A spectacular complex of museums, shops, and apartments known as the Fourth Grace was supposed to be the architectural cornerstone that would take the city of Liverpool out of its post-industrial doldrums and into a brave new future. “But when escalating costs killed the £325 million project off in the summer, the Fourth Grace became an icon for another kind of Liverpool, an inescapable reminder of the constant stream of failed projects and broken promises in the city.” The real tragedy, though, may be that Liverpool is still trying to reinvent itself with expensive new buildings, when it already has all the raw ingredients of a beautiful city waiting to be highlighted.

Looking at photographs of Toronto’s surreal and gravity-defying new Sharp Centre, one wonders whether such a bizarre and whimsical structure could possibly exist in reality. But as Benjamin Forgey discovered, the building – a huge horizontal rectangle with a distinct crossword-puzzle motif, balanced precariously atop six pairs of stilts – is every bit as real as the photos suggest. “The marvel is threefold: that folks rather enthusiastically allowed this thing to be built, that it works so well as a practical matter, and that, quite simply, it is beautiful.”

“Situated between the lordly British and German digs [at the Venice Biennale], Canada’s stage, designed by Milan-based architects for our best artists… is a curiously self-effacing structure, more likely to be found near Georgian Bay than near the Canale di San Marco. Overcoming its cramped, curved interior space has been as much a problem for the artists as their own pieces.”

A Canadian artist was gazing at a famous Mondrian painting some years back, when something told him that he’d seen a similar layout before, in his old 1980s-era Atari video game system. “Pac-Mondrian is the meeting ground in arcade-game format between Toru Iwantani’s classic 1980s Atari game Pac-Man and Piet Mondrian’s oil painting, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43), the motionless but vibrant jangle of red, yellow and blue rectangles representing the expatriate Dutch painter’s reaction to the hectic, well-travelled grid of New York in the early 1940s.” The unauthorized mish-mash has become a legitimate Internet art smash, with tens of thousands of visitors playing the game and admiring the art.

When the Dallas-based Meadows Museum sent out invitations to its new exhibit featuring works from the extensive collection of Nona & Richard Barrett, the thinking was that the museum was celebrating a rich legacy of Texan art. But some artists attending the opening were stunned to discover that their Barrett-owned works were not in the show, despite the fact that the museum had listed their names in the brochure. It was all a big misunderstanding, of course, but the hurt feelings have remained.

An antique cabinet sells at auction for £19illion, making it the most expensive piece of furniture to be sold at an auction. “The sale broke the cabinet’s own record price of £8.5m when it was bought at Christie’s in 1990. The Florentine furniture was made between 1720 and 1732 for Henry Somerset, third Duke of Beaufort.”

The president of Taiwan says he’ll endorse building a branch of the Guggenheim Museum on the island if his party wins in parliamentary elections this week. Critics assailed the president’s promise, calling it campaign rhetoric. “Taichung city council earlier this week rejected Hu’s proposal for a Guggenheim branch, citing insufficient funding. The mayor intended to seek the central government’s help to save the project.”

Did Tate Modern turn down an offer by Charles Saatchi to donate his collection? Saatchi says yes, Tate no. Now Saatchi says he’s not in the mood. “I lost my chance for a tastefully engraved plaque and a 21-gun salute. And now the mood has passed, and I’m happy not to have to visit Tate Modern, or its storage depot, to look at my art.”