Category: visual

“A vast digital library of world art has gone online with its first 300,000 images. The project — known as ARTstor and financed by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation — could eventually revolutionize the way art history is taught and studied. It is available for nonprofit institutions only.”

At the end of this month, James Wood leaves as director of the Chicago Art Institute. One thing he wishes he could have done during his time there? Drop the admission charge. “I still have this idea that in the best of worlds it would be awfully nice to have no charge for a museum. It is an important piece of our cash flow so it’s not something under present circumstances that one could do without. But there’s still a certain intimidation factor, and particularly for what I’ve called our local citizens, anything you can do to encourage people to drop in and use the museum on a regular basis is desirable.”

“Modern Greece may indeed be a last-minute culture, as so many Athenians have claimed in the rocky run-up to the Games. But in the case of the New Acropolis Museum, unlike the rest of the Athens 2004 construction projects, no amount of accelerated effort could get the job done. Today, the New Acropolis Museum remains little more than a series of foundation pilings. And the majority of the contentious sculptures they were to hold, a series of exquisitely sculpted marble friezes that once adorned the Parthenon, remain in the British Museum.”

A proposed 60-story tower in Philadelphia that will require big zoning variances to make it work, has city planning officials pleading helplessness in compelling a better project. So what power do city officials actually have to make a more liveable city, asks Inga Saffron.

After Seattle Post-Intelligencer architecture critic Sheri Olson wrote a negative review of a local housing project, the architects threatened to sue. Olson – a freelancer – asked the paper to “guarantee that it would represent her should [the architects]decide to sue.” When the paper declined, Olson quit. Oddly, the architects – Weber + Thompson – didn’t dispute the quality of the building; rather, they maintain that “most of the changes… have been out of our control.”

A new documentary claims that Manet’s father, “one of France’s most esteemed judges, had an illegitimate son whom the painter brought up as his own.”

“The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, conceived by the 19th-century writer and historian Thomas Carlyle, is said by its friends to be in urgent need of a facelift. Supporters say the gallery is closer to the search for Scottish identity than any other.” So now a proposal for a fix-up.

So Tony Blair’s government is mounting a clumsy attack on graffiti. “The natural liberal response to this is to defend the richness and wildness of graffiti, the layers of rotting posters, scrawled secret language and spray-can calligraphy that makes dull walls speak hidden dreams in fat lurid lettering. To deny any connection between graffiti and art is not tenable, given the fascination it has exerted on serious painters since the second world war. In the 1980s the intellectualism of Twombly and Dubuffet spawned a far coarser appropriation of street painting by art dealers who fell over themselves to represent the graffitists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. And that’s when it all went wrong for graffiti.”

“Australian indigenous artists will spend next year painting the ceilings of a new museum in Paris, the French embassy has confirmed. The Musee du Quai Branly, a museum of ancient arts and civilisations, is under construction on the banks of the Seine near the Eiffel Tower and the Australian embassy. It is expected to open in early 2006.”

“No other photographer of his time lived and worked so long or commanded the admiration of so many artists, critics, editors, museum curators and connoisseurs of photography—not to mention the public at large—and none bore worldwide fame with a more appealing combination of intelligence, authority, insouciance and self-deprecating irony.”