Category: visual

Italy is finally sending a stolen obelisk back to Ethiopia. “The monument is one of a group of six obelisks erected at Axum when Ethiopia adopted Christianity in the 4th century A.D. It was stolen by the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1937 and turned into a symbol of fascist power during his short-lived efforts to revive the grandeur of imperial Rome. Despite signing various agreements that promised to return the 1,700-year-old monument, the Italian government showed no signs of doing so until the obelisk was badly damaged by lightning in a thunderstorm in 2003.”

Installation of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 7,500 gates in New York’s Central Park will begin next week. “The Gates,” as they are called, will be festooned with saffron-colored fabric panels and will line 23 miles of pedestrian paths from Feb. 12 to 27. They are being made in Queens and are nearly finished. The artists say they have been working on the project for 20 years.”

An ambitious plan to renovate Berlin’s remarkable Museum Island is in danger. “A federal accounting office spokesman said the €130m (£93m) plan was too expensive. ‘We have nothing against the architecture. It’s simply a question of finance’.”

Debate is roaring over a plan to redo the Stonehenge site to accomodate tourists. But photographs over the past 150 years show that successive generations have meddled with the site trying to make it more “user friendly.”

AJ blogger John Perrault is impressed with the new Museum of Modern Art. “I was surprised that the complex is as successful as it is. It’s all a 3-D grid, fittingly so, given the midtown street grid. If the truth be known, neither façade is much to look at. But once inside, except for the atrium, the building disappears. This is an artist’s and an art-lovers dream.”

“With 120 art galleries in a town of 4,058 people, or one gallery for every 34 residents, the city council of Carmel-by-the-Sea voted last month to limit the number of new galleries moving into town. Carmel’s leaders decided that the city, which earns no sales-tax revenue when out-of-state tourists snap up a watercolor, has reached aesthetic overkill.”

“It has long been known that classical statues were painted. Indeed, their creators sometimes chose different kinds of stone for different parts of their statues according to the way they reacted to paint and wax, using types that could be highly polished for the fleshy parts and coarser varieties that would absorb paint for the drapery. Some art history books have included coloured photographs to give an idea of how the statues of the Greeks and Romans would have looked to contemporaries. But I Colori del Bianco (The Colours of White) is the first show to confront us with three-dimensional copies created with the help of meticulous scientific investigation.”

“The past year or two has seen a total and astonishing reversal in the reputation of modernist architects. These days, who but the most blinkered retired actor would refer to Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre as Treblinka? The once mocked and scorned Colin St John Wilson has become a national treasure, knighted by the Queen, whose scion once reviled Wilson’s British Library building as resembling an academy for secret police. How come this change of heart?”

Much of the Afghan art missing after the American invasion has been surfacing. “The bulk of the newly inventoried items were found in April 2003 when a presidential palace vault in Kabul was cracked open to reveal a trove of famed, intact Bactrian gold pieces. But many more artifacts, including giant Buddhist sculptures and ancient ivory statues, have been found in recent months in unmarked boxes and safes stashed for safekeeping during the Soviet-led coup and then during the years of hard-line Taliban rule.”

“After a period in which strongly sculpted museum buildings have dominated, often upstaging their contents, Taniguchi’s MoMA represents a return to the time-honored way of housing art in lofty rectangular rooms. Because it looks so coolly cerebral, it is hard to imagine people making pilgrimages just to see the architecture, as they do with Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim in Spain. Taniguchi’s exquisite white-walled spaces are so understated that they verge on invisible, which is exactly what MoMA wanted. The art remains the main draw. The architecture merely provides the frame.”