Category: visual

The London memorial fountain for Diana has collected huge criticism. “The design was denounced as unworkable. Experts were found to say that algae would make the fountain green and slippery, that bacteria would make it unsafe. It was described as a storm drain, a cattle trough that thinks it’s a toddler’s waterchute, a hole in search of a meaning.” Gustafson defends her work: “The fountain is a victim of its own success. We need to make some minor modifications to cope with that success, with the sheer number of people.”

Architect Daniel Libeskind would seem to be having a bad year. He’s battling with the developer of the WTC site. And his “Spiral” addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum is likely not going to happen. But he’s philosophical: “When you’re a kid with artistic yearnings brought up in the Bronx, you don’t get fed up too easily. It took 10 years to build the Jewish Museum in Berlin [his first building; overall, a critical success]. Nearly everybody said it would never happen. It was too crazy, too unrealistic. But it did happen.”

The Michaelis Collection at Cape Town’s Old Town House is renowned for its collection of Dutch and Flemish masters such as Frans Hals, Jan Steen and Anthony van Dyck, and “is seen as one of the best of its kind outside the Netherlands.” Next month the museum is opening a show that will flip these paintings with the faces to the wall. The exhibition “Flip” is “a conceptual art intervention” on one of the country’s premier art collections.

Graffiti is a big problem in the UK, says a new study. More than £27 million a year is spent on cleaning it off public structures. “Organisers of the anti-litter campaign believe part of the blame lies with advertisers, pop stars and members of the art world who depict graffiti as part of a modern trend.”

Five years after German politicians directed the country’s museums to search their collections for artwork that might have been stolen from Jews by the Nazis, only a handful of artworks have been turned up. There has been little cooperation from the museums – “only about 165 of Germanys 6,000 museums have reported” that they have any suspicions of artwork that might have been stolen.

Edinburghers are proud of the new visual arts exhibition space for the annual Edinburgh Festival. “For more than 50 years, it has not been possible to complement the drama and music programme of the Edinburgh International Festival with a large-scale exhibition of visual art, because of the limited gallery space in the city. With the completion of the Playfair Project, that barrier no longer exists. Scotland now has a world-class exhibition space of the size to take the largest international shows, and mount them in perfect conditions.”

American representation at next summer’s Venice Biennale is in jeopardy. “The committee that recommends an artist to represent the United States at the Biennale has been disbanded by its overseer, the National Endowment for the Arts, which is rethinking its involvement with federal advisory committees. And the State Department, which is responsible for American representation at this and many other international exhibitions, is not only looking for someone to run it but also to help pay for it.”

Guatemala has convicted three men for “stealing an eighth-century Mayan altar from an archaeological site and then threatening to kill anyone who told the authorities. The trial was Guatemala’s first criminal prosecution of antiquities thieves and the first of its kind in Latin America. Archaeologists and prosecutors hope the verdict and the prison sentences for the three men will have a powerful deterrent effect on the looting of the country’s many Mayan sites.”

A copy of a JMW Turner painting that has never before been on public view has been put on display. “The watercolour, showing the Gothic Cross over the lake at Stourhead, Wilts, has been in the Tate archives since it was bequeathed in 1856. A copy of the work, which was painted in 1798 when the artist was 23, is being exhibited at the National Trust-owned Stourhead house and garden this month.”

In July, Bosnia’s famout Mostar bridge reopened after a decade of work. “It had been destroyed by Bosnian Croats in 1993, during the Bosnian War, to expunge a symbol of cosmopolitan Islam dating from 16th-century Ottoman times. Its destruction caused an uproar, and rightly so. Simultaneously, Bosnian Serbs were busy obliterating some 70% of the local Muslims’ historic monuments. The Serbs then moved on to similar deeds in Kosovo. The bridge’s reopening had been a belated triumph. Under the aegis of Unesco, countries such as Turkey, Italy and Croatia contributed to the project for a decade along with town residents…”