Category: visual

London’s Serpentine Gallery has garnered some attention in recent years with a series of pavilions constructed and deconstructed in less than a year’s time. But this year, the gallery is upping the ante, hiring a Dutch firm to encase the entire building in a grassy mountain which will tower over Kensington Gardens. “It is a wild, thrilling, slightly bonkers idea that promises to make the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion one of the most exciting architectural events of 2005.”

The £5,000 Jerwood Prize, which in recent years has come under attack for stretching the definition of the word “drawing” in passing out its awards, was handed out this week to Sarah Woodfine. Ms. Woodfine’s winning entry is likely to please the Jerwood’s critics – it’s a pencil and paper drawing – but the judges insist that they intend to continue accepting entries in multiple mediums.

“A spectacular exhibition of contemporary art opened in Berlin yesterday, amid a picket by Jewish protesters, with its billionaire owner accused of exploiting art to redeem his family’s Nazi past.” The quality of the works in the collection is not in question, but the motivations of their owner, Christian Friedrich Flick, are being picked over by press and public alike. The Flick family fortune, which made the art collection possible, was built on slave labor in the explosives factories of the Third Reich.

Canadian architect and Blackfoot Indian Douglas Cardinal, the original designer of the Smithsonian Institution’s much-hyped National Museum of the American Indian, will not attend today’s opening “because he is still angry after being taken off the project in 1998 and not paid what he says he is owed.”

“The Beaverbrook Canadian Foundation is suspending hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to New Brunswick institutions and using the money saved to help fund its controversial legal action to gain clear ownership of 200 art works at Fredericton’s Beaverbrook Art Gallery.”

A major New York art collector is poised to donate his trove of some 2,500 pieces of contemporary drawing to the city’s Museum of Modern Art. Harvey S. Shipley Miller, who until recently collected mainly Russian avant-garde books, has served on the MoMA board since 2001, and spent only a year amassing his impressive collection of drawings, which is insured for $75 million. “The collection’s focus is on artists who have emerged in the last two decades, but there are also contemporary works by artists who became prominent in the 1960’s and 70’s.”

This year’s edition of France’s Biennale des Antiquaires has a noticably streamlined feel to it, and the upgrade is no accident. Christian Deydier, president of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires which puts on the Biennale, has spent the last two years correcting what he saw as the fair’s descent into the ordinary. This year, the high-end jewellers who had previously been able to exhibit alongside more serious art and antiquities dealers have been effectively banished to a dank corner, and dealers who were perceived to be offering less than excellent works for sale were disinvited. The result is a decidedly more upscale art fair.

This week, a judge will finally rule on whether or not the Barnes Foundation may break the rules laid down by its founder, and move the famed collection to Philadelphia in an attempt to stabilize its financial situation. But isn’t a key voice missing from the discussion? “[T]he move has generated a good deal of commentary. Except from the one corner of the art world that, given the issues at stake, you would have most expected to hear from: the Association of Art Museum Directors… By sitting on the sidelines in the Barnes debate, AAMD is gravely damaging its moral authority.”

In 2006, the British Museum will lend a priceless clay drum known as the Cyrus Cylinder to Iran for several months. It will be the second time the artifact has been lent to Iran, and hopefully, it won’t be as eventful as the first: back in 1971, the British Museum found itself in the middle of some serious international intrigue when it “decided to lend the antiquity without consulting the Foreign Office, and the UK government later feared that the Iranians would refuse to return it.” The real story of what occurred in the ’70s has only just been declassified in Britain, and UK museum officials have been stunned by the extent to which international politics played a role.

The National Museum of the American Indian doesn’t look like your average Washington museum. In fact, had it not been so well-executed, it could have easily looked out of place in the nation’s capital. “Bringing rude nature to the hallowed ground of the Mall takes guts, of course. But this is not rude nature. No wilderness actually looked like this. It is as calculated a built artifact in its own way as is Tomorrowland. It is nature to which human intelligence and imagination have been applied. It is an Indian’s image of Eden.”