Category: visual

The proposed Taiwan Guggenheim Museum is still a go, say Taiwanese officials, even though funding for the project has been bogged down for some time…

Cartoonist Peter Baage goes to a Seattle gallery and has a (figurative) shouting match with the contemporary art there. “95% of what they’re hyping is pure crap, yet if you say as much out loud you’ll be looked upon as a clueless Philistine!”

Valuable historic Hawaiian artifacts have shown up for sale in an antiques store. The question is: how did they get there?

Customs officials in Jordan seized “two boxes of suspected Iraqi relics at Al Karama border crossing last week, following a routine search on a private car. The boxes, hidden in the boot of the vehicle, contained 18 statues, which the driver claimed were to be mailed to an exhibition in France.”

A police officer at St. James’s Palace has damaged a painting. “The work, by a minor 19th century artist, was worth £1m before the incident. The officer was standing on a chair closing a window when he fell and damaged the painting. A Scotland Yard spokesman confirmed the incident but said no action would be taken as it was an accident”.

Why do security barriers have to be so ugly? All that brutal concrete… So four architects take a stab at designing barriers that are aesthetically pleasing. “One can create them so that they camouflage the brutality of what we have to deal with daily.”

“After years of searching for a home for her husband’s estate and realizing that time was running out, Patricia A. Still, 84, agreed to give 750 paintings and more than 1,400 works on paper to Denver on the condition it build and maintain a $7 million museum for them.”

The Smithsonia’s 16th museum – the National Museum of the American Indian – is opening in September. “The biggest difference between the new Smithsonian museum and others housing native artifacts is that Indians were consulted every step of the way. Even the most progressive museums have committed egregious errors in American Indian interpretation.”

A historic mural from the ceiling of the old Chicago Daily News Building was removed in 1993 after one of its panels was damaged. Its owner promised the mural would be restored and put back in place. But 11 years later…

“The Venice Biennale Foundation has announced that Maria de Corral and Rosa Martinez will co-direct the 2005 international art exhibition that opens next June, and that Robert Storr will organise the 2007 edition. The Biennale board seems to be concerned that the exhibition has become too sprawling and, in process, has lost its shape. They want to rejuvenate it and integrate it more fully into the overall Biennial programme (which includes architecture, cinema, and performing arts) and to achieve that they want the exhibition to have greater focus.”