Category: visual

There is more to the great battle over the future of Philadelphia’s Barnes Foundation than just an argument over the location of the permanent collection, says Edward Sozanski. In fact, the future of the Barnes’s educational program is the subject of a debate that truly gets to the heart of the foundation’s mission. “The Barnes gospel of aesthetic analysis, which the founder expounded in a number of books, letters and public utterances over three decades, contains the key to the collection. Yet over the last six years, the Barnesian doctrine, which remained reasonably intact for more than 60 years through several administrations, has been strained by what amounts to a theological schism.”

“The Olympic Games are returning to Greece. And Santiago Calatrava, a Spanish genius of Parnassian accomplishments, has redesigned a sports complex that now embodies the tensile strength of athletes in their glory… Some engineers criticize Calatrava because prominent features of his buildings are structurally inessential. They serve purely expressive purposes. Architects, meanwhile, fault his work for appearing to be stuck in the 20th century. But the appeal of Calatrava’s work, if you are susceptible to it, lies in its hybrid quality. Rather than fusing architecture and engineering, the designs arise from the struggle between them.”

One of the most controversial civic art projects in recent U.S. history opened to the public this weekend, and Blair Kamin was bowled over. “Remember the dusty pit that sat for decades amid the beaux-arts splendor of Grant Park, Chicago’s front yard? Well, it’s gone, turned into a joyful park that’s sprinkled with smile-inducing sculpture and mind-bending ‘wow-chitecture.’ This is the miracle of Millennium Park, the $475 million fusion of old-fashioned world’s fair and newfangled cultural spectacle that opened Friday. Yes, there have been huge cost overruns and delays, and they have resulted in some less than ideal park spaces. But get real: Did anyone ever ask Eiffel whether he busted the bud-get on his tower? The park is found ground — a no place that is suddenly a someplace.”

Millennium Park will be many to things to many people, but to Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley, it will be his legacy. “When Mr. Daley took office 15 years ago, the site, north of the Art Institute and east of Michigan Avenue, contained old railroad tracks and gravel parking lots.” Mr. Daley’s vision for a useful public space became the biggest civic art project in the city’s history, and depending on whom you ask, it is either a testament to the skill and vision of the designers and fundraisers who brought it together, or an overpriced boondoggle spearheaded by a mayor who cut the public out of the process.

The centerpiece of Millennium Park is the new Gehry-designed Jay Pritzker Pavilion, which will serve as the new 11,000-seat home to Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra. “Even in a city renowned for its big moves, Gehry’s project makes for an extraordinary structural drama. And the stage on which that drama occurs — a new 24.5-acre park at the foot of the downtown skyline — plays perfectly to the architect’s strengths, allowing his explosively sculptural forms all the room they need to preen, as they were not free to do in his dazzling, but more tightly confined, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles.”

“Philip Johnson’s steel and concrete fantasia in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, designed as the New York State Pavilion for the 1964-65 World’s Fair, has been crumbling for decades. Now it is finally getting some attention… The Queens Theater in the Park — which produces performances geared to the borough’s immigrant communities — is planning to build an 8,000-square-foot addition to its space, a small section of the pavilion that was called the Theaterama during the World’s Fair… But the shiny new addition will also call attention to the blighted condition of [the huge ‘Tent of Tomorrow], which appears to be on the verge of collapse.”

“The Chicago art establishment, from museums to galleries to artists, still seems shaken by what it perceived to be the failure this spring of its internationally known contemporary art fair.” In fact, Art Chicago has been gradually losing the interest of the international art community for years now, and the flurry of activity surrounding this weekend’s much-ballyhooed opening of the city’s new Millenium Park is meant in large part to put Chicago back on the map where art is concerned. Art Chicago’s organizers insist that a comeback is imminent, but observers are skeptical, especially as the fair prepares to move to temporary quarters in a 125,000-square foot tent.

“As Berlin prepares to unveil one of the world’s biggest private art collections, curators said Tuesday they had recruited historians to shed light on the controversial Nazi-linked past of its founder. The collection of Friedrich Christian Flick, comprising some 2,500 works, is due to open in September. Berlin beat out other world capitals that had vied to host its first public exhibition. But the event has faced fierce criticism already, especially from Jewish community leaders in Germany, who rail against showcasing a collection begun by Flick’s grandfather, a notorious collaborator of the Third Reich.”

“The month-long event is scheduled to open January 18, 2005, in a range of state-owned art venues, including the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, the Central House of Artists, the Shchusev Architecture Musem and the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art.”

“As a result of cultural and economic shifts in the art world, exploding globalism, and the high costs of more traditional shows, a growing number of exhibitions both in the US and abroad are devoted to replacing clichéd preconceptions with the vital, modern work of contemporary artists from a wide variety of cultures.”