Category: visual

The French billionaire François Pinault would like to build a grand new contemporary art gallery in Paris, but true to form, he doesn’t see any need to do it the easy way. After all, this is a man who once bought a chapel in Brittany, dismantled it, and moved it to his home, all to house a sculpture he had just bought. The Pinault museum is slated to cost $270 million, and will be built on an island, on the site of an abandoned Renault car factory. “On the island’s western tip, six machines are scraping away at the factory’s concrete ruins; later this year, construction will begin to replace the derelict shell with what could become Europe’s most avant-garde contemporary art museum.”

Taiwan is a step closer to bringing a Guggenheim museum to the island nation after the legislature approved a first-year budget, and an economic council signed off on a plan to fund the $180 million project. The funding plan still needs to be approved by the legislature and the executive, but success appears likely by the end of the calendar year. The Guggenheim would be part of a larger cultural district in the city of Taichung, slated to include a new City Hall designed by Frank Gehry, and a Jean Nouvel opera house.

France is preparing to announce the site of a new branch of the Louvre, to open in 2009. The outpost would display 500 pieces from the museum’s permanent collection on a rotating basis. “The project is part of a drive towards decentralisation that will bring culture and business to some of the country’s more impoverished provinces. Estimated to cost €105 million ($127 million), the new building will be 60% funded by regional government, with the remainder from the French State, European Union and municipal governments.” The short list of cities in contention for the new Louvre are all in the economically depressed northern part of the country.

A controversy is brewing over the ownership of eleven wooden tablets believed by the Orthodox Christian church of Ethiopia to be remnants of the Ark of the Covenant. The tablets are in the possession of the British Museum, which admits that it came by them under fairly shady ethical circustances and which, in deference to church beliefs that the artifacts can only be viewed by senior clergy, has locked them away in a basement. “It is, of course, somewhat pointless for a museum to hold objects that can never be seen by scholars, let alone by the general public. Delicate discussions are therefore underway for a long-term solution.”

A previously unknown painting by Francisco de Goya has been discovered by an art restorer in Managa, Spain. The painting, which is massive, shows a virgin resting on a cloud, and was previously thought to have been painted by a little-known contemporary of Goya. During a restoration, hidden figures that were Goya’s trademarks emerged in the work, and a lab analysis has confirmed the work’s authenticity.

Boston has a thriving new alternative gallery scene in the city’s South End, with new galleries opening weekly and loft-style condos suddenly infesting a previously downscale neighborhood. “But while gallery owners wonder if the burgeoning South End neighborhood will mean business, residents wonder whether the neighborhood is going upscale too rapidly.”

The UK’s Commission for Architecture needs a new director to oversee the country’s heritage and wrangle with sticky questions of future development. So why are the short-listed candidates all individuals with little to no knowledge of architecture? “This loss of nerve, which threatens to turn [the commission] from an organisation set up to nurture Britain’s architectural culture into a band of all-purpose do-gooders comes when [its] income from the government has trebled to £11 million a year. Of that, it spends nearly 25 per cent on salaries for its staff of 65.”

“Five months after they made their first shocking appearance, the Abu Ghraib photographs have become a museum exhibition. Once ubiquitous on television and in newspapers, they now qualify as quasi-aesthetic artifacts, pictures you may choose to seek out – for edification, as a distraction, even… Placing these atrocious pictures in a sleek white room and inviting us to cogitate on their visual properties raises some interesting ethical questions. Why Abu Ghraib but not images of beheadings, which are also on the Web, floating in the digital ether, fragments from the same new photographic universe?”

The U.S. Army is planning a $200 million museum in Virginia, to be funded entirely by the government. “After a competition among many elite architects, the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has been chosen to design the 255,000-square-foot museum complex. Opening day is planned for June 14, 2009.” The Army insists that recruitment is not the aim of the museum, although the video-game aspect of warfare will apparently have a role, with plans including “a parade ground for simulated battles and an annex for 4-D simulators like those found on the most advanced new amusement park rides.”

In recent years, the art of Raphael seems to have fallen out of favor with the public. “While Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo leap out of the past as living men – their lives intense and fascinating, their works disturbingly immediate – Raphael has become remote. The recent fuss over the National Gallery’s bid to buy his Madonna of the Pinks revealed just how distant we are from him. No one could say why he is so special.” Could it be that Raphael’s embrace of a style which attempted to impose order on chaos is so foreign to us, in an age in which chaos is the accepted norm, that we have forgotten how to view it?