Category: visual

Wisconsin philanthropist Jerry Frautschi is even more popular in Madison’s arts community today than he was previously. Back in the late 1990s, Frautschi agreed to pay the entire cost of designing and building a new performing arts center in the capital city. But no one was sure of exactly how much that cost was, until this week, when the Overture Center announced that Frautschi’s gift would total more than $200 million, more than double previous press estimates. Frautschi agreed to pay for the center because he believes that such projects should not be built with public money.

It looks increasingly as though Daniel Libeskind’s Spiral addition to the Victoria & Albert Museum won’t get built after all. “In theory its striking tumbling-boxes look is not the issue. But from the moment the Spiral was chosen over seven competing designs in 1996, it has stirred passionate debate here, dividing traditionalists from those eager to see London embrace avant-garde architecture. And inevitably this controversy has shadowed the museum’s arduous search for financing.”

Should the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan be rebuilt? They were destroyed two years ago by the Taliban. “The statues looked solid but they were fashioned out of the cliff here because the sandstone is soft. Now the remains are mostly sand. The idea of rebuilding seems laughable. But these piles are the cause of one of the most passionate debates in archaeology.”

Why does Disney Hall need a giant Claes Oldenburg/Coosje van Bruggen tie-and-collar on the sidewalk out front? Christopher Knight writes that “on a digitally fabricated picture of the sculpture on-site, it works like the giant Carpeteria genie or Michelin Man outside a rug shop or tire store — sculpture that functions as a sign. In less than a year, Disney Hall has become perhaps the most famous building in Los Angeles, which means one of the most famous in the nation. You wouldn’t think it needs a sign.”

Milwaukee is in love with its new Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Art Museum. But it’s clear now that if the museum is going to be able to keep up its new treasure, there’s going to have to be a new level of commitment to doing it. “The difference between simply owning an icon of international architecture and paying for maintenance on a complex, innovative, precedent-smashing structure isn’t always understood.”

Toronto’s mammoth CityPlace project is “one of North America’s largest residential developments and, at the risk of putting too fine a point on the matter, it’s making an ass of downtown Toronto.” How does it go wrong? Let me count the ways…

Spanish-born artist Santiago Sierra hired 10 Iraqi immigrant workers and sprayed them with liquid plastic to make his latest work. “My first reaction to the use of living men and women in this way was revulsion. I felt indignant that a modern artist should use vulnerable people to make work that will be shown to a small, rarefied, and comparatively affluent audience. Is it not a violation of human dignity to pay immigrants to participate in so hazardous and humiliating a process? As visitors to the exhibition, are we not somehow colluding in the economic exploitation of migrant workers?”

A new Canadian Museum for Human Rights, to be built in Winnipeg, was the dream of the late Izzy Asper. He put up much of the money and the Canadian government said it would chip in a significant amount. But then the country got a new Prime Minister, and though the project is well into the planning and design phase, the feds have reversed field. The government “position is simple and stark: There is no written commitment for federal funding beyond the $30-million, and therefore no commitment exists.”

So Diana’s memorial fountain in London had a few problems and had to be closed for awhile. The critics are howling. But “if we are to savage every teething problem and failure, how will we ever learn and progress? Things do go wrong.”

More and more countries are making claims on artifacts held in foreign museums. “Museums are concerned that if they acquiesce to one request, everyone with a claim will do the same and they will lose their incentive to be the museum they are. As a result, many shy away from it completely in order to protect their entire collections.”