Category: visual

“Italy’s rich heritage is under attack as never before from vandals and professional thieves. In a series of incidents in the past four weeks in Venice and Rome, hammers have been used to smash statues and fountains. In some cases, the heads of Roman statues more than 2,000 years old have been cleanly cut away using powerful circular saws, more than likely by professional thieves working to order.”

“Leonardo’s most celebrated work, the Mona Lisa, has deteriorated so significantly over the last year that conservation experts at the Louvre have ordered urgent analysis of its condition. It will then be moved to a new, specially-designed gallery as part of a E2.3 million project paid for by the Japanese company, Nippon TV. Although this project was announced a few years ago, it is finally coming to fruition.”

The mayor of Miami threatens to scuttle a $2 billion bond issue if proposed funding for two museums isn’t removed. “The mayor said he is concerned that ‘Museum Park’ could turn into a fiasco like the Performing Arts Center being built in downtown Miami, which is almost two years late and now $240 million over its original budget.”

“The war in Iraq has been especially disillusioning for young Iraqi artists, many of whom believed the American promises of freedom. As the old order fell, they sat in their cracked-window studios and at paint-splattered easels and dreamed of an Iraqi renaissance.” But the despair which is now gripping the ‘liberated’ Iraq is overwhelming any thoughts of such a rebirth of culture, and the work of an Iraqi artist is now likely to reflect “the mayhem of a suicide bomb, the agony of a mother who has unearthed the dusty bones of her son, the confusion of his country today.”

The wholesale renovation of Chicago’s historic Soldier Field (home of the NFL’s Bears) has been roundly panned by football fans and architecture critics alike since it was completed last year, and now, the federal government has weighed in with its own verdict on the ultra-modernist redesign, stripping the stadium of its place on the list of National Historic Landmarks. The decision “sent a message that resounds far beyond Chicago’s aesthetically mangled lakefront football stadium: The government will react — and strongly — if avant-garde architects and arrogant politicians sack the nation’s most extraordinary places.”

“For years, American cartoonists have complained that their world is getting smaller. Plagued by slumping readership and beholden to high profit margins, daily newspapers are busy reducing the size of comics and cutting those that fail to gain support from older readers. Meanwhile, cartoonists who want to try something different, like mammoth Sunday strips, sometimes get the cold shoulder from editors. So it’s ironic that the next big thing in the comics world is a small cell-phone screen. But the distributors of strips from Crankshaft to Dick Tracy are working to get a foothold in that tiny space, and at least two cartoonists say they’re thrilled to get the exposure.”

Whatever happened to the grand old art of political buttons? Once upon a time, a presidential election brought us such memorable and wearable gems as “I Like Ike” and “I’m Daft About Taft” – and few could forget the classic Goldwater button that emphatically declared “In your heart, you know he’s right,” and the anti-Goldwater parody that shot back, “In your heart, you know he’s nuts!” These days, though, every button from every campaign looks the same – blue backgrounds, American flags, the names of the candidates, and nothing else. At what point did one of America’s cleverest forms of politicking become such a deadly bore?

The British Museum has spent the last several years answering charges over the way it acquired several of its most prized pieces. But is the argument even focused on the right topic? “Controversy over ownership of its treasures obscures the British Museum’s purpose. By offering everyone insights into cultural history, argues its director Neil MacGregor, the museum promotes a greater understanding of humanity.”

New York’s New Museum of Contemporary Art is currently homeless, as it waits for its new home in the Bowery to be completed, but rather than merely vanishing from the scene for two years, the museum is hoping to renovate its image in the interim. “The museum’s curators were… acutely aware of the need to use the transition to the new building as an opportunity to think again about the definition of the museum. And so, while it has taken 7,000 square feet of space on the first floor of the Chelsea Art Museum on West 22nd Street for a year, its curators decided that the first major show would not be within walls, but outside them.”

When the Philadelphia public school district discovered earlier this month that it was in possession of an art collection potentially valued at tens of millions of dollars, it was hard to know what to do about it. What the district is doing is to mount a full-scale measure of what exactly it has, where it all came from, what it may or may not be worth, and how such a varied and amorphous collection of works could best be utilized in an educational sense. One thing is for sure – the district doesn’t intend to sell any of the works – but it will take great resolve for officials to avoid being stampeded by the various interested parties sure to come out of the woodwork.