Category: visual

Media giant Clear Channel is now in the museum exhibition business. But at least one critic has big reservations. “Nowhere in the promotional words from the corporation do we see the word ‘art’ or the phrase ‘high-quality art exhibition.’ The promotional phrases are all about size and scale. This should give any art museum pause. If “Saint Peter and the Vatican” is a harbinger of Clear Channel shows to come, it should give art museums further pause. There are a smattering of marvelous things in the show. For example, there’s a small Bernini sculpture that should wow anyone who loves sculpture. But the presentation is way too heavy on gold, silver and bejeweled artifacts and too light on paintings and sculptures.

Unsuccessful at convincing the British Museum to return the Parthenon Marbles, the Greek government is staging an exhibition at the Parthenon to run while the Olympics are in Athens in August. “The intention of the exhibit will be to show the world our case, that we would like to unite the pieces of the frieze and the statues. Now we think the Olympics will be a chance to get the world interested, to put the pressure on the British to finally return these important pieces of our heritage.”

A Association of American Museum Directors is examining the deal that sent 21 of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts’ Monets to a Las Vegas casino last winter. “The AAMD is concerned that commercial initiatives such as this could jeopardise the not-for-profit status of museums in the US and the directors’ organisation is now moving towards self-reform before tax-hungry legislators target museums and end their tax-exempt status. The AAMD guidelines stipulate that ‘In any decision about a proposed loan from the collection, the intellectual merit and educational benefits, as well as the protection of the work of art, must be the primary considerations, rather than possible financial gain’.”

“When the explorer Captain James Cook was killed on the island of Hawaii, the tragedy was immortalised as the murder of a peaceable man. But more than two centuries later, a painting has been discovered that shows a rather different version of Cook’s demise, with the captain engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the islanders.”

“The Metrpolitan Museum has long been the jewel in the crown of the Upper East Side, a sprawling wedding cake of a building celebrating the marriage of art and money. In the past few years, however, some of the museum’s neighbors have begun to see the Metropolitan less as a refined repository of priceless cultural artifacts than as a tacky tourist attraction of idling school- and sightseeing buses, souvenir sellers, and street performers—far more democratic than Fifth Avenue has ever considered desirable. Then, in 2000, the Met threw down the gauntlet, pushing a plan through the Parks Department that called for a 200,000-square-foot expansion” and the neighbors revolted…

“Just as New York is shaking off its sorrows and crawling out of debt, making new claims on the world stage with a bid for the Olympics, our museums seem to be going through weird convulsions, falling apart, abandoning their collections, being hijacked by trustees or suffering delusions of grandeur. This is their most precarious moment in many years.” From the “perennially insecure” Whitney to the dumbed-down Brooklyn Museum to the cash-strapped Guggenheim, it seems that none of the city’s venerable art institutions are safe from the new malaise.

“It’s hard to say which part of Frank Gehry’s Jay Pritzker Pavilion, opening Friday as the $50 million centerpiece of Chicago’s new Millennium Park, is the most striking. Is it the bandshell itself, with its 50-foot steel-and-glass doors that roll in and out from the sides? Is it the almost baroque proscenium… that frames the stage with a 120-foot-tall fantasia of billowing shapes clad in brushed stainless steel? Or is it the metal trellis that crisscrosses like a vast spider-web above the heads of the potentially 11,000-member audience? Whatever the answer, it’s clear that many people are happy with the combined result.”

“A small London gallery has been told by Royal Mail to destroy prints showing postage stamps of the Queen in a gas mask – and tell them of anyone who owns copies. The series, Black Smoke, Stamps of Mass Destruction, was created last year in protest at the Iraq war by James Cauty, a former member of the art-world pranksters and rock musicians known variously as KLF and the K Foundation.” The UK’s postal service is claiming that the works violate its copyright.

This year, Sotheby’s came within hours of auctioning off what it claimed was an authentic painting by the Russian artist Ivan Shishkin. The asking price was £700,000, a huge number, especially when it turned out that the painting was actually a forgery created on a £5,000 work by an obscure Dutchman. The backstage fallout from the near-auction has been swift and cutting. “Behind the scenes there are growing recriminations in the secretive world of Bond Street dealers. One accuses Sotheby’s, which dominates the market, of lack of competence.” Others are alleging that this is hardly the first time the auction house has been duped.

In September a judge will hear further arguments about whether the Barnes Collection ought to be allowed to move to downtown Philadelphia. “On the face of it, opponents of the move appear overmatched by the trustees, the deep-pocketed foundations subsidizing the plan, the Philadelphia tourist industry, and many cultural leaders. But they have begun to mobilize for what might be the Barnes loyalists’ last chance to keep the foundation’s collection in Merion and its school intact. The mobilization has taken two forms, fund-raising and public relations.”