Category: visual

“Chicago has something new and unexpected in the heart of downtown: the Bean. Only a few days into the opening of Millennium Park, a mere four and a half years late, locals have taken their newest piece of public sculpture into their affections. The legume-shaped sculpture, a 110-ton hunk of highly polished steel, has been designed by Anish Kapoor, the Anglo-Indian sculptor. It is his first piece of public art in America, but remains unfinished.”

A British parliamentary committee says museums need to be more business-like. “Unbelievably, some museums and galleries have made losses on activities that were supposed to generate income, and have an inadequate grasp on the costs involved,” says one critic. “All museums and galleries must be more robust in their planning. They should establish five-year targets for income growth and set out how these will be achieved; in doing so they must properly identify which activities are profitable and the risks to be managed. Seventeen government-sponsored venues received grants worth £280m last year, and generated an additional £108m.”

What is bad art? A Melbourne collector thinks she knows. “After a decade of ferreting in dusty op shops, she has nailed the criteria: a complete lack of technical skill; unusual, poor or tasteless subject matter; and an asking price of $2 or less. Round’s collection of 200 original canvases, dubbed The Museum of Particularly Bad Art, is being unleashed on the public. Like a B-grade movie or a lovers’ public spat, you can’t look away. This is art so bad it’s downright good.”

Daniel Libeskind is suing the developer of the World Trade Center site. “Libeskind, with his spritely face and quirky glasses, had been the epitome of compact cool when his design won. Now he was girding to descend into the murk and mire of a court battle. His suit claims that Silverstein merely paid lip-service to the master plan because his ‘actions, then and up to the present time, bespeak a clear intent to derail the project wherever he perceives a conflict with his personal financial interests’. All the high-minded rhetoric and outward symbolism (1776, the tower’s height in feet, is the year the Declaration of Independence was signed) had apparently been erased by the dirty business of litigation.”

Is the New York Historical Society changing its focus because a donor has dangled a prized collection in front of it? Critics suggest that the collectors chose the society “because its history of financial weakness has left it malleable.”

The new National Museum of Australia director Craddock Morton has a big job in front of him. “His mission? To deliver much-needed stability to the NMA after the so-called history wars brought its exhibits – especially those relating to indigenous history – under fire and provoked a federal Government review.”

Artists often live in poverty, and old age is tough. Now there’s a new plan to help out. “The Artist Pension Trust invites up-and-coming artists to contribute 20 pieces of their work to a tax-protected fund over a 20-year period on the theory that some of the art will appreciate significantly. All the artists will share the profits, even if their initial promise never translates into increased value. It’s a way of taking advantage of the capitalistic nature of the market and mix in a healthy dose of socialism to create a hybrid form.”

“Jasper Johns might have initially looked like a pop artist, but there was always something deeper going on. And if, over the past half-century, Johns has deepened what was already a pretty complex painting game, he has also mystified us. If, at the end, he is painting anything, it is the process of the mind at work, filled with stray thoughts, its affinities and enthusiasms. A mind led by curiosity, and haunted by its own past, from which it cannot extricate itself.”

Philip Dodd is resigning after seven years as director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “What I have done is accept that the walls between art and science, culture and economics, art and politics have collapsed. I have tried to work in the rubble of those walls and accept that the distinctions between those things don’t exist any more.”

Liverpool has abandoned plans to build the Cloud, a 10-storey globe that “would have been the ‘Fourth Grace’ on the city’s Pier Head, joining three others landmarks, including the Liver building, known as the Three Graces. But yesterday the public sector partners involved in the scheme said it was “no longer viable” due to rising costs, design changes and potential planning problems. The structure, designed by Will Alsop, whose work includes the Peckham library in London, caused controversy in December 2002 when promoters announced it had won an architectural competition.”