Category: visual

“Ambitious new plans for the future are transforming the dusty halls of some of Europe’s most revered galleries. In Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain, museums are scrambling to create bigger, more-dazzling exhibition spaces, smart new restaurants and shops, study centers and inviting public areas. The push reflects a shift in how the public regards its artistic institutions. ‘People want more than the old-style museum. We are driven to become more an arm of the entertainment and education industries rather than the academic institutions we used to be’.”

The plan was to give Athens a makeover before the Olympics. “Greece has spent millions of euros building dozens of Olympic venues and is spending millions more to remodel Athens for the 2004 Games. So far, the fruits are impressive: a modern new airport, national highways, a new train and subway system, and the refurbishing of run-down neighborhoods. But the 24-hour growl, drill, and rattle of the massive project has also exhausted the city, especially in the hot summer. Olympic organizers had to rush to finish Olympic venues, leaving little time for the ambitious makeover of the city.”

China’s avant garde is flourishing. “Talk about a cultural revolution. It wasn’t long ago that government censorship severely curtailed creative freedom in China. Everything from nudity and abstract art to rock and roll and literary erotica was taboo. No longer…”

A new $200 million Museum of Tolerance in Israel designed b y Frank Gehry, is drawing skepticism. “In the culminating segment of a film made for the Center’s facilities in Los Angeles and New York, for example, a middle-aged man says: ‘Tolerance is based on a conviction there’s room here for everybody.’ That definition is a profoundly American one, reflecting the reality of a nation with vast space and no existential threats. It sounds irrelevant, even ludicrous, in an Israeli-Palestinian context. In this country, almost no one believes that there is enough land or political power for everybody to share equitably. Which may be why the proposed museum is already drawing withering and widespread criticism, years before its opening.”

In the Middle East, a building is never just a building, just as a national boundary is never just a boundary and a religious shrine is never just a tourist attraction. Frank Gehry is finding this out the hard way, as his design for the new Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance draws withering fire from both Israelis – who have called the design “so hallucinatory, so irrelevant, so foreign, so megalomaniac” – and Palestinians, who accuse Gehry of designing a building that calls to mind the Israeli destruction of Yasir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah. What everyone seems to be saying underneath the rhetoric, however, is that the museum is just too American.

“Museums don’t like to call attention to it, but many of the ancient artifacts in their collections are what curators delicately call ‘unprovenanced’ — that is, they don’t know where the pieces came from because they were removed from their original “find-spot” unscientifically, at best, or illegally, at worst. It’s not a new problem.”

Denver Airport has removed three pieces of art from its terminal after six employees complained. The art – called “The Luggage Project” consisted of suitcases made by artists around the world. One of the suitcases is “splattered with glossy red and black paint and contains bricks. A bumper sticker inside the suitcase reads, ‘Blood for oil. Billionaires for Bush’.” Airport officials deemed the art “too stressful for passengers and workers to view in light of the heightened security following 9/11

Two Whitney Museum employees have been arrested for stealing admission money. One, “Nafeem Wahlah, 29, the museum’s manager of visitor services, stole $850,000 by voiding ticket sales and keeping the money. Investigators found $800,000 in a safe in her Brooklyn home, and she was caught on camera putting cash into her purse.”

There’s been increasing attention on contemporary art from the Arab region in recent years. “But with this spike in recognition, a young generation is now struggling to assert a singular identity that doesn’t conform to Western stereotypes of art from the region. As the channels of globalization open commercial opportunities abroad, it’s increasingly difficult for Arab artists not to conform to the expectations of those flocking to the gallery shows, biennales, websites, and organizations dedicated to art from the region.”

“Las Vegas’s Bellagio, it seems, is not Nevada’s only art attraction: Reno is home to the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, the nation’s biggest and most successful auction of Western art. Every July, hundreds of well-heeled collectors from Maine to Hawaii flock here and spend millions of dollars on important works by Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, and other celebrated painters of the Old West. Any one of them will be glad to tell you why these works are here instead of at some fancy-pants auction house in Manhattan.”