Category: visual

Tourist traffic is destroying Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. “Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities has asked the archaeologists, architects and engineers of the Theban Mapping Project – launched 25 years ago simply to make a detailed map of the 62 tombs and temples of the pharaohs and nobles buried more than 3,000 years ago – to complete a plan for the conservation of the valley by the end of 2005.”

A Berlin museum has re-erected a portion of the Berlin Wall. “The rebuilt concrete barrier stands at the former Checkpoint Charlie border crossing, next to a field of 1,065 crosses meant to represent the people who were killed as they tried to escape the former East Germany between 1961 and 1989.”

A theif managed to steal jewelry out of the British Museum over the weekend. “The raider beat sophisticated security systems and pocketed around 15 items, including ornate hairpins and fingernail guards. He is thought to have posed as a visitor and grabbed the items from under the noses of staff.”

In the early years of the 20th Century, art dealer Lord Duveen helped America’s wealthiest become important art collectors. Their collections form the basis of the country’s great museums. But “the most important legacy of their collaboration has been its toxic effect on the intellectual culture of art: it accelerated a divorce of connoisseurship from criticism. Duveen subsumed fine discrimination to the legitimatization of wealth, a function that, augmented by modern forensic technologies, it continues to perform.”

“A European Union-funded project is looking at providing tourists with computer-augmented versions of archaeological attractions. It would allow visitors a glimpse of life as it was originally lived in places such as Pompeii. It could pave the way for a new form of cultural tourism.”

Scottish painter Jack Vettriano made this year’s list of “most powerful” people in the art world. But “Vettriano, a former miner whose popular paintings have earned record-breaking prices at auction in recent years, is given a sarcastically critical entry which begins by claiming the 53-year-old first made his living by ‘copying Old Masters’ and ends by noting that no major public gallery had so far chosen to invest in his work, ‘thank Heaven’.”

“Tate Modern, one of the most popular art galleries in the world, fears for the future. Last week the Tate organisation was forced to beg 23 artists, including David Hockney and Damien Hirst, to donate works it can no longer afford. The Tate is hopelessly outgunned by big spending foreign rivals in the acquisition of important work… The Tate estimates that, given the cuts or freezing of its government funds year after year, and inflation in market prices of as much as 1,000 per cent, the organisation’s buying power is now about 5 per cent of what it was 20 years ago.”

“In a society otherwise enamored of the styles of the 1960’s, the architecture of that decade is rarely loved and frequently reviled. All over the country, 60’s buildings are being torn down while much older buildings survive. Functional problems, like leaky roofs and inadequate heating systems, are often to blame. But just as often, the buildings are simply disliked by institutions that have enough money to replace them.” There is a burgeoning movement afoot to save the structures, but the “so-bad-they’re-good” logic doesn’t seem to be attracting many supporters for the boxy, concrete buildings that dominated the ’60s.

“A committee of American museum curators has selected Ed Ruscha, a leading painter, to represent the United States in June at the Venice Biennale, putting an end to a year of questions about whether the country would participate in the prestigious art festival.”

Much has been made of the new home of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, but what about what’s inside the building? MoMA’s collection has been wholly reordered and rearranged, and the results are impressive, says Linda Hales. The museum has made use of the increased space to broaden its outlook and move beyond the Bauhaus to a much wider array of contemporary art. The idea is for MoMA to retain its commitment to featuring 20th-century art movements, even as it devotes more energy to current themes.