Category: visual

When Chicago’s Terra Museum of American Art shuts its doors this weekend, it will represent a major loss in the city’s cultural landscape. Or will it? “The Terra Museum’s failure to draw crowds even after effectively eliminating its admission charge a few years ago led to the decision to close… [but] most Chicagoans, including members of the city’s art establishment, have greeted the closing with a collective shrug, even though it leaves the city with only two major art museums.”

“At a news conference this week, the British Museum’s head of treasure, Roger Bland, called on eBay to agree quickly to ‘pull down’ Web auctions of artifacts when British authorities identify them as potential national treasures, a step that eBay has been reluctant to undertake without legal proof that the items qualify as treasure… In negotiations that have stretched over a year, eBay has agreed in principle that it doesn’t want illicit antiquities on its Web site and is willing to remove them provided the British authorities can state clearly which ones are illegal. But British officials have not been able to give a clear definition.”

“Along with the other stars of the Impressionist movement, Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Degas has been one of the most recognised and popular painters in the world; and of Degas the man, we know almost nothing. But the peculiarities of his private life did not escape his contemporaries – nor were his quirks denied by the artist himself.”

New York’s Affordable Art Fair is a rarity – a major art event aimed squarely at ordinary people who have always assumed that collecting is outside their monetary means. “More than 130 galleries will offer original work by some 500 artists at the fair, and every piece is between $100 and $5,000. There will also be art demonstrations and tutorials on how to buy.”

The design of the new permanent home of Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art has been unveiled, and it stands in stark contrast to the flashy, eye-catching architecture that currently dominates the museum scene. “[Architect David] Adjaye’s concept puts the emphasis on dramatic interior spaces. Rather than jutting angles, the 25,000-square-foot building offers a placid interplay of light… Most of the exterior will be sheathed in glass, its color yet to be determined. About a foot inside the glass will be walls of translucent plastic, which will… allow in some diffused light during the day and radiate a glow from inside at night.”

Ed Ruscha has been chosen to represent the US in next summer’s Venice Biennale. “Ruscha, 66, was selected by directors and curators from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.”

How important is the Museum of Modern Art to America? Robert Hughes: “To put it plainly: Moma, to give it the acronym by which it is always known, made modern art mandatory in America. It did this not only by collecting it, showing it, moving big money into place behind it and evangelising for it, but by setting the prime example whereby, in the US, the function of the museum shifted from accumulation to teaching. This came to apply to almost all museums, not just those dedicated to a hitherto enigmatic or marginal ‘modernism’.”

A new “reality” show asks viewers to name their most hated piece of architecture. At the end of the season the building will be demolished. “The show’s announcement has triggered a paroxysm of designating. All over Britain, architects and civic associations have singled out for elimination buildings–generally works dating from the 1950s and 1960s–deemed “unworthy” of keeping company with the icons of modern architecture (such as Lord Foster’s recent “Gherkin Building”) or deemed eyesores.”

England’s Alsop Architects has declared bankruptcy. “Alsop has been the driving force behind a plethora of media-grabbing projects, including the intended transformation of Barnsley into a semblance of a Tuscan hill town, the planned creation of a “mega-city” for 15 million people linking existing settlements across the north of England, and the rebranding of Middlesbrough with proposed blocks of flats shaped like Prada skirts.”

A man has been found guilty of cutting up a Salvador Dali painting and using it to create a new piece of art. “John Peter Moore, a former private secretary to the artist, cut up a stolen 1969 Dalí painting, The Double Image of Gala, and used it to create what he claimed was a new Dalí.”