Category: visual

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has decided that the Uffizi should be expanded to rival the size of the Louvre or British Museum. “A proposal to enlarge the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, under discussion since the end of World War II, has been fast-tracked by the Italian government. Mr Berlusconi has announced that Euros 60million ($72 million) project to double the size of the available display space from 6,000 to 13,000 square-metres is to be completed by 2006.”

“If you stick a quarter of a million turkey feathers dyed black on all four walls of a room in a major art gallery, you are bound to get some kind of reaction from visitors – if only splutterings about taxpayers’ money. Curators at Manchester Art Gallery said this week that they were delighted that the responses to Susie MacMurray’s installation, Flock, have been the most intense since the gallery reopened in 2002 after being extended and refurbished.”

“These days, the icon of Renaissance art is Florence’s greatest single brand and the global Michelangelo market is booming. You might imagine that as the years go by, the chances of finding a long-lost Michelangelo would shrink. But no. As one expert has observed, as the price tag on the world’s greatest artists keeps soaring, so, miraculously, more hidden Michelangelo gems keep being discovered.”

Twenty years ago the Prince of Wales famously opened his attack on modern British architecture by comparing it to “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend.” “Perhaps what he could not see at the time was that far from retreating into a cosy world of agreeable Georgian architecture, British architects would return to the fray with a forward-looking architecture that is, on the whole, far superior to what had gone before the carbuncle speech at Hampton Court.”

Richard Chang wonders why magazines like ARTnews focus so much on the price of art. “Sure, folks are curious about money, and any journalist worth his or her salt should be following the buck to a certain degree. Plus, we are entering the auction season, which emanates out of New York, London and Paris. But don’t articles like these reinforce a small, ultrasuccessful cadre, ignoring the majority of skilled and passionate painters, sculptors, installation, video and performance artists?”

Next week, Seattle’s new public library – designed by Rem Koolhaas – opens, and Herbert Muschamp is ecstatic: “In more than 30 years of writing about architecture, this is the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review. I could go on piling up superlatives like cars in a multiple collision, but take my word: there’s going to be a whole lot of rubbernecking going on.”

Conservationists are attempting to have Silbury Hill in Wiltshire reclassified as a building to protect one of the most enigmatic prehistoric structures in Europe. The move would reclassify the largest manmade mound in Europe. “The guardians of the 4,700-year-old hill have been trying to persuade people to keep off Silbury since 1974, when it was closed to the public, without destroying its appearance with intrusive fencing. The monument came close to destruction three years ago when torrential winter rain seeped into shafts left by earlier excavation, which collapsed. Although English Heritage has carried out repairs, the whole structure is vulnerable.”

“Ever since trustees appointed by Lincoln University gained control of the foundation’s board, the debate on how the Barnes should operate now and in the future has been skewed, either through ignorance or deliberately. The public, the media and the art community have long perceived the foundation to be a museum. On the other hand, the foundation’s indenture of trust, which governs its operation, is quite specific that it’s a school. Lower Merion Township agrees, because residential zoning along Latches Lane allows schools but not museums.”

Being a painter is tough these days, writes Blake Gopnik. “There will always be talented artists who can overcome the difficulties that painting faces. In fact, with the odds so stacked against them, the handful of truly good paintings that get turned out look that much more impressive. I’ll bet that somehow, somewhere, someday — in a decade, a century, could be a millennium or two — a whole new kind of painted work will come along to breathe new life into the medium. Painting has dead-ended before, and each time a Titian or a Monet, a Picasso or a Pollock has hit on a way out that no critic could have guessed at in advance. Any critic who insists that can never happen again is asking to eat crow.”

“The British Beaverbrook Foundation, a trust established by the late Lord Beaverbrook to continue his charitable works, has filed a lawsuit in an effort to claim millions of dollars’ worth of art housed at the Fredericton (New Brusnwick) Art Gallery. The gallery holds an exquisite collection of art by such masters as Turner, Botticelli, Gainsborough and Dali. However, his grandsons, Max and Timothy Aitken, who head up the British and Canadian Beaverbrook Foundations, say that 175 art works at the gallery are the property of the foundations and they want at least some of them back.”