Category: visual

Prices for contemporary art have soared in the past year. Collectors are paying huge prices for art that only a few years ago was inexpensive. “Bubble? Did someone say bubble? In talking to over a dozen contemporary art world leaders, I heard wildly differing opinions as to whether one exists. Not everyone sees imminent danger, particularly those sellers currently managing the enviable problems of swelling client waiting lists and packed auction houses. From where I sit, though, a bubble looks real. When will it pop? Who knows?”

The new Museum of Modern Art building is essentially conservative. “This museum wouldn’t have wanted Bilbao if Frank Gehry had done it for nothing. The Modern has supported, collected, and celebrated architectural design more than any other museum in America, but it has never allowed its identity to be defined by any architecture of its own. It is one thing to display Frank Lloyd Wright models inside your galleries; it is quite another to have Rem Koolhaas design your building.”

“Is more truly more? moma, which I first visited in the late nineteen-forties, was a relatively intimate collection of human-scale works in non-palatial rooms. You could hustle through it in an hour or two, on a one-way route. With the expansion of 1964, which added the great Picasso-Matisse room, some choices for ambulation were offered; but it was still, on the second floor, a single experience. Now four floors, plus soundproof galleries for video and media, beckon from all sides. One of the charms of a museum for modern art was that there wasn’t too much of it, just as a lifetime of history wasn’t too much. After seventy-five years, a life is a stretch and the cathedral may have too many chapels.”

An auction of contemporary photography cleared $9.2 million Monday night, including a record $600,000 for a photograph – Barbara Kruger’s “I Shop Therefore I Am.” “This was a historical sale for a market born in the 80’s that came to age in the 90’s.”

The Whitney Museum has proposed expanding in the past, but the timing (or building design) hasn’t seemed right. “Now the Whitney is trying a gentler approach. A new design by the Italian architect Renzo Piano, approved last week by the museum’s board, is conceived as a stoical nine-story tower that would rise alongside the existing 1966 landmark. The tower’s simple form and silvery copper-and-aluminum-alloy skin would be a dignified counterpoint to Marcel Breuer’s brutal dark granite masterpiece.”

Contemporary Chinese art is hot right now. “For a country that has virtually no contemporary art history, where artists’ training is dominated by an ultra-traditional grounding in Chinese painting techniques, where the first clues as to what was happening in the postmodern western art world trickled through as recently as the late 1980s, the scene has mushroomed and transmuted with staggering velocity, artists running through mini-movements (political pop art, the much discussed trend for body art in the mid-1990s, through to a strong focus today on installation, film and video) with alarming speed.”

Last week’s New York auctions of Impressionist and Modern art hit records and signaled a strong market. “What detracted from what was in most respects an astonishing sale was that Sotheby’s marketing machine had hyped it so much and set such high estimates to get the business from vendors that the prices almost seemed disappointing.”

After a decade of building skyscrapers, Shanghai is now the world’s most densely populated city. But now the city is sinking. “The rock bed is about 300m from the surface and the underground water table is higher, about 1-1.5 m from the surface. There are now more than 4,000 buildings more than 100m tall in Shanghai. That results in extremely severe ground settlement.” It’s just one of the reasons why city planners are now desperately trying to halt the architectural annexation of Shanghai’s skies. Dearth of greenery, horrible pollution, inadequate transport and an almost unbearable press of humanity on the streets are others.”

An investigation has concluded that India’s Taj Mahal is not sinking. “Indian authorities launched an investigation in October when historians reported that the Taj Mahal was leaning and in danger of sinking.But the four Taj minarets were observed to be inclined at various angles by the Archaeological Survey of India’s (ASI’s) first scientific survey in 1941, which examined the position and verticality of the minarets as well as the foundations’ stability.”

A British archaeologist says that 90 percent of major archaeological sites in Iran and Pakistan have been looted. “Although the illegal destruction occurs abroad, much of the looted material is channelled here to Britain and is sold in London. The best material is coming to London. His research found that Iran is being plundered of treasures dating from 3,000BC to AD500, and Pakistan is being robbed of antiquities created between 500BC and AD400.”