Category: visual

Washington, D.C.’s City Museum, which was designed to showcase the history and heritage of the city’s neighborhoods, has announced that it will close its exhibit galleries next spring, less than two years since the museum opened to the public. The materials exhibited at the space will remain available for viewing by appointment, but the museum was forced to acknowledge that it had failed to develop any sort of audience for itself. “It [had] hoped to be a gateway for tourists whose interest in the city would be whetted by the materials there and who in turn would discover areas off the Mall by themselves.”

You don’t often think of art as a physically dangerous profession, but the fact is that artists of all stripes routinely work with a wide array of exceedingly hazardous machinery and chemicals, and many are not well-trained in coping with the dangers involved. From acids to paint fumes to turpentine, artists exposed to chemicals over time are at risk for a variety of long-term illnesses.

Architect Enric Miralles died in 2000, four years before his design for the new Scottish Parliament building was realized. And the reaction to the building from the general public has been widely negative. Still, says Christopher Hume, the complex “reverses the notion of the national legislature as a place that towers above the landscape, a beacon of state power. The Scottish Parliament reinvents the political system as a city within a city, a community set apart yet deeply connected to its surroundings.” And the public distaste for the project may well have much to do with the widespread antipathy towards the government itself.

Designing a government building is always a dicey proposition, but in Scotland, where the long march towards some measure of self-rule has been a particularly painful one, the new Parliament building seems to evoke much of that struggle. “As a composition, it is disjointed and rambling; much of its detailing is overly fussy… Yet the building, which Queen Elizabeth will formally open on Oct. 9, is mesmerizing nonetheless. Its sometimes tortured forms are able to convey, with remarkable emotional force, the sense of a first-rate creative mind struggling to come to terms with myriad ideas and practical challenges.”

The massive sculpture that stands in front of Baltimore’s train station is, to put it mildly, unpopular. In fact, nearly 100 locals gathered at a public forum recently to demand the removal of Male/Female, sculpted by Maine resident Jonathan Borofsky. But the forum turned out to be mainly an opportunity for art experts to tell the unhappy citizenry that they’d “get used to” the piece, and to highlight other examples of public art that were initially reviled.

“Once photography took over the role of depicting reality in the mid-19th century, painters faced the question of what to paint. As new styles from Impressionism to Abstraction flowered, the dominant approach was to avoid anything the camera could record.
Still, artists who stuck with recognizable images continued to paint and exhibit their work – without the respect of modern art’s movers and shakers… these painters of so-called representational art have finally been brought back into the fold – and that the art world has finally shed the notion that a single style defines a ‘serious’ artist.”

“Colorado artists are set to get a windfall worth nearly $1 million as decorators for the new $278.5 million hotel across from the Colorado Convention Center go shopping for art. … Another $1.5 million worth of artworks will be purchased through the city’s long-running percent-for-art ordinance, which requires that 1 percent of city-funded construction budgets be set aside for art.”

“Massive Change,” Bruce Mau’s much-anticipated, optimistic but uneven new show on the future of design, has arrived. “The exhibition doesn’t set out to map the future of design in any way one might expect…. (It) maps, instead, the often invisible design of things such as the global market economy, advances in medicine and agriculture, systems of ecological renewal and human transport. Every activity mankind engages in, everything that leaves our material stamp on the world, must be contemplated as a design project, says Mau. And we have choices.”

“An exhibit depicting a hanged child at an art fair in the southern Spanish city of Seville has sparked a row between the gallery and local authorities, who yesterday demanded it be removed. The work in resin by Italian sculptor Maurizio Cattelan is on show at the Biennial of Contemporary Art but has sparked controversy — as it did in Milan last May.”

There will be much more to see in the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection when MoMA reopens Nov. 20. Rethought during the closure, the collection now includes objects from 1821 to 2004. “But the new installation does not seize the popular moment, with respect to two important cultural developments: the arrival and establishment of virtual design and the Internet, and the remapping of the domestic landscape because of multiculturalism.”