Category: visual

“An extraordinary museum collection, which includes Napoleon’s tooth brush, Nelson’s razor, and a small piece of the 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, will feature in a new centre for arts and science in London… The £20m centre is also to provide a permanent home for the 600,000 volume medical history library, the largest in the world outside the national medical history library in the US.”

Like so many other American cities, Washington, D.C. has struggled to create what its former mayor called a “living downtown” with a distinct core of urban dwellers. But a new round of downtown residential construction is offering a chance at architectural revival, with the hope that a unique urban look will attract new residents. But for every great new building that goes up, it seems that four more uninspired, boxy concrete blobs rise as well. Are the city’s architects abandoning creativity in order to insure that their buildings have the requisite exercise rooms, rooftop pools, and other amenities supposedly demanded by today’s urban residents?

As New York prepares to welcome the Museum of Modern Art back to Manhattan, one striking architectural aspect of the museum’s new home should be noted: the lack of a striking architectural aspect. “[MoMA] won’t be housed in a titanium sculpture by Frank Gehry, an explosion of Daniel Libeskind shards or even one of Will Alsop’s boxes on stilts; instead it will be in a simple but elegant building designed by relatively unknown Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi… In the case of MoMA, modesty makes sense. The New York skyline long ago became a cacophony of styles and intentions; the last thing it needs is another voice screaming to be heard.”

Meet the art world’s hottest young artist: “Within a week of her most recent exhibition, she had been filmed by more than 10 TV crews, received calls from David Letterman, Ellen DeGeneres and Oprah, and been labelled a ‘world-famous Abstract Expressionist’. But the artist herself is said to be oblivious to it all. She is, according to those closest to her, ‘kind of reclusive’, ‘very sensitive’, ‘temperamental’ at times, and extremely loath to talk about her work.” And she is… four years old!

The 1989 Bay Area earthquake the best thing to happen to the area’s museums in a long time. Many museums were damaged in the quake and had to address plans to rebuild. “In the mid-1980s, nothing had happened to any of our museums in 50 years. The scene felt very retarded. Now, all these museums have reinvented themselves with new buildings and new initiatives that make people feel differently.”

One of the sites the Barnes Foundation is considering moving to in Phiadelphia is currently accupied by community baseball fields. Community groups who use the fields have reacted with dismay to the Barnespotential move. “The ball fields – two baseball diamonds and a small children’s playground along the northern part of the Parkway – are home to countless children’s baseball, softball and soccer games and serve hundreds of children from several city neighborhoods.”

The Barnes Foundation, currently in court trying to convince a judge to allow it to break its founder’s trust and move to Philadelphia, is considering two sites if it is allowed to move…

What does Deborah Gribbon’s resignation as director mean for the Getty Museum? Christopher Knight canvasses the museum world and finds some criticism. “For longtime museum watchers, this avalanche of public dismay from within the upper echelon of American art museum administration amounts to a stunning rebuke.”

A rare double-sided painting by Emily Carr is coming up for auction in Canada. One of the images is a self-portrait that Carr presumably didn’t like…

Earlier this summer the British government promised extra funding help to the country’s ailing museums. But “since the summer, a mysterious silence has fallen, and Tate director Nicholas Serota now condemns what he believes is a broken promise. ‘My fear is that far from it being the museums’ turn, the museums will go to their traditional place – at the back of the queue’.” What will get the funding? Sports.