Category: visual

Clyfford Still’s estate paintings will go to the Denver Art Museum. “Patricia A. Still, the artist’s 84-year-old widow, has chosen Denver as the repository for more than 2,000 works from the abstract expressionist’s estate. Putting an exact value on the gift is difficult, because Still’s paintings are rarely sold, but Mayor John Hickenlooper said the collection’s value could be as much as $1 billion.

The US Postal Service produces only 35 new stamp designs each year. But a new service lets consumers design their own stamps. “PhotoStamps allows anyone to design their own image and emblazon a stamp with it. Thus, be prepared to see a wave of stamps with babies, cats, weddings and other personalized images and logos arriving in a mailbox near you.”

Visual artists are attacking the Edinburgh Festival for not including visual arts in its annual lineup. “You are morally responsible for including visual art – or you mustn’t call it the greatest festival in the world. Without the visual arts being properly supported you develop a misunderstanding of the purpose of art – you can’t tell the whole story through music.”

Concrete is cheap, and efficient, and comparatively easy to work with. What it is not is attractive, and so it is understandable that architects and artists have not frequently embraced it as a medium. “But concrete has a rich history in aesthetics. Though it has been responsible for much that was dreary and utilitarian, it was also the glop that built the Pantheon in Rome. And now architects have returned to it as an aesthetic device.”

Frank Gehry’s addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario is doomed to be a disappointment, says Christopher Hume, because Toronto has always refused to view Gehry as an architect when it can view him as a home-grown celebrity instead. “Not that Gehry’s famous for being famous anywhere outside of Toronto. In some cities, he’s famous for his buildings. Indeed, in some cities, his buildings are more famous than their creator. It’s enough to make you feel sorry for the man. Sure, he’s a celebrity, but he’s also an architect, a great architect even. Even if it turns out brilliantly, the AGO addition was always too limited to give Gehry, the architect, the scope to do something major, something spectacular.”

Gottfried Helnwein is an artist whose work – “giant color portraits of stillborn babies, paintings that merge Nazi-archive photographs with pictures Helnwein has taken, enigmatic portrayals of apparently wounded or menaced children” – tends to provoke strong reactions, and in recent years, several individuals have expressed their displeasure with some of his images by defacing them. Helnwein confesses to being initially startled by the vandalism, but these days, he has decided that the viewer has as much to contribute to the larger discussion as the artist, and if people are moved to destroy what he has created, he can at least salute their passion.

“When the new National Museum of the American Indian opens [in Washington, D.C.] on Sept. 21 amid a flurry of drumming, chanting, eagle feathers and sweetgrass ceremonies, it will mark the culmination of a debate that began in Canada in the 1980s over who gets to tell the aboriginal story… Most of the museum’s staff boast native ancestry and the story the museum tells is in the first person.”

The National Museum of the American Indian may be an architectural and societal triumph, but the man who designed it is so upset that he isn’t even attending the opening. “[Architect Douglas] Cardinal was picked, along with the firm of GBQC in Philadelphia, to design it in 1993 but the museum’s board wanted him to work under James Stuart Polshek, former dean of the Columbia School of Architecture, who is well connected in Washington… ‘Polshek wanted me to be Tonto to his Lone Ranger — his sidekick,’ says Cardinal. ‘I told them I wouldn’t work with that individual. He called me racist.'”

“Two new museums open in the Washington area during the last year or so. One, in suburban Virginia a good hour’s drive from the Mall, lives up to hopeful expectations… The other museum, smack downtown and across the street from the new Convention Center, falters after just 14 months of operation… The reason for the difference? Wondrous stuff to look at — or a puzzling lack of such.”

“As more high-profile buildings by foreign architects rise in the United States, and as computers allow architects to strive for engineering, design and construction complexities never before imagined, a gathering rumble can be heard across the profession about the way America builds. The country has garnered a reputation for overlooking gaping joints, sloppy measurements and obvious blemishes, and refusing to deviate from even the most outmoded standardized practices. Having exported its expertise, in the 80’s and early 90’s, to destinations from Singapore to Dubai, it is now facing stiff competition from Europe and Asia, where the building traditions favor singularity, craftsmanship and durability over speed and cost.”