Category: visual

Native Americans have had a big role in deciding what will go in the new National Museum of the American Indian, due to open in Washington DC next month. “What they did not want, museum officials found, was the static display of 10,000 years of tribal life and culture. Their ideal museum would celebrate the glories of the past, to be sure, but they also wanted their artifacts and their contemporary culture to be accessible. ‘This is an important opportunity to show tribal people as participants in a living culture, not something in museums or in history books.”

In Italy, big-time architects are being hired to design churches (like in the old days, remember?). “It is premature to say that Renzo Piano’s spidery dome or Richard Meier’s three sweeping concrete sails and glass facade will push Roman Catholic architecture into a period comparable to the glory days when churches were stylistic showcases for masters like Francesco Borromini and Lorenzo Bernini. But some church officials are hoping that a return to architectural splendor will help put people in the pews.”

“A quarter of a million pottery shards from small jugs, an underground pool, a foot-washing stone and wall carvings unearthed in a large cave west of Jerusalem could be the first archaeological evidence for the existence of St. John the Baptist, according to a forthcoming book.”

As a protest an artist has pulled a London bus 30 meters with his big toe. “Mark McGowan, 38, dragged the 7.5 tonne vehicle on Wednesday in Camberwell, south London. The stunt was in protest against bus lanes and mayor Ken Livingstone’s ‘ridiculous traffic strategy’.” Last year McGowan pushed a nut seven miles down raods with his nose to protest student debt.

Preservationists are opposing a plan to put a car tunnel under Stone Henge. “For them, the proposals prove the government cares more about motorists than preserving the integrity of a centuries old landmark. ‘Stonehenge has been there 5,000 years and the car was only invented 100 years ago. To cater to something that’s been there for such a short time is patently absurd’.”

AJBlogger Tyler Green agrees with Blake Gopnik that Washington DC needs a contemporary art center. But he takes issue with an idea floated by Gopnik for a local collectors’ collective. “Here are a couple problems with Gopnik’s idea: The art world is global, moreso now than ever, and his idea is based on a narrow, artificial, regionalist construct. Furthermore, Gopnik’s idea has nothing to do with art and everything to do with the mere geography of amalgamation. When the art world is becoming more interconnected, when group shows at even medium-sized institutions are filled with loans from two or three continents, why would we want something that is so internal, narrow and exclusionary?”

Blake Gopnik’s idea for a collectors group, floated in the Washington Post, is an intriguing idea. “Of course, we’d all get into an immediate and fun argument as to what “contemporary” means. To Blake it’s obviously at least Arbus, Judd and Hirst – names that a lot of young curators and collectors may already find old and quaintly traditional — that’s what happens when one endorses the “new” rather than what’s good. To some, Arbus, Judd and Hirst may already belong in the company of the Matisses and Oldenburgs.”

Critic Blake Gopnik outlines his plan for Washington, D.C., private collectors to exhibit the city’s hidden plenty, serious contemporary art, in what he’s calling the Washington Collectors’ Project. “As the first project of its kind, the WCP would also help to put the city on the art-world map, and would likely lead to copycatting elsewhere.”

London’s Royal Academy is having a dreadful year. Divisions in leadership, accusations of mismanagement, and plenty of general squabbling have muddied the RA’s reputation. “Now the talk in London’s art circles is that the Royal Academy has lost its way.”

People have been searching for the hidden city of Atlantis for generations. Many theories of where the legendary city was have emerged. The latest? “A geographer has claimed that Atlantis, first described by the Greek philosopher Plato as sinking under a tidal wave 12,000 years ago, was actually Ireland.”