Category: visual

“The aim of the project, funded by a grant of NZ$56,500 from the Royal Society of New Zealand, is to generate interest in science among people who might not normally be keen on the subject. We came up with the idea of Stonehenge because it doesn’t matter who you are — everyone looks at the Pyramids and Stonehenge and structures like that (and asks) who built them, why did they build them?”

A complete sketchbook, containing 26 separate works from a 1970 album of watercolors by Pablo Picasso, is going on display in New York this week. “The full book from the collection of art dealer Heinz Berggruen was carefully unbound for framing, and will be reassembled for sale at $3.5 million. Such sketchbooks are very rare, as most belong to the Picasso family.” The entire album was created in a single week, and reveals a deeply personal side of Picasso’s late work.

While museums the world over have gone on a binge of commissioning trophy buildings by famous architects, the Museum of Modern Art is going with basic modernism (at $425 million). “A museum is not architecture, and it is not a collection. It is both. A museum, in other words, should not compete with its art. The midtown Modern, scheduled to open in late November after being closed for two and a half years, is 630,000 square feet of straight walls, floors and ceilings with no obtrusive columns or dead-end hallways. It is a building with a harmonic precision.”

The Brooklyn Museum is projecting a new face to the world. “Arnold L. Lehman, the museum’s waggish, enterprising director, is emphatic about wanting to ‘open the museum up.’ He’s trying to make it more like a town square than a temple. This sounds beneficent. But remember, nowadays everywhere you go is like a town square; a museum has the singular, sometimes transporting virtue of being a place where you can leave the group and immerse yourself in the richness and mystery of the group mind. Nevertheless, to those who might think his ideas are faulty, Lehman bluntly replies, ‘I don’t care.’ Under his leadership, the museum has increased attendance and reinstalled the collection in showily painted spaces. Sometimes the results are illuminating, other times infuriating.”

“One year after looters stole some of its most prized antiquities, the Iraq (news – web sites) Museum in Baghdad is undergoing a top-to-bottom restoration that its leaders hope will make it one of the premier museums and research centers in the world. The project is being funded by donations from around the world and is not likely to be completed for at least two years.”

“The Iraq National Museum could be ready to open in a few months. Physically the building could be opened. The construction work is done. But we wouldn’t want to do that until the security contract for physical improvements and upgrades is done. It’s up to the Iraq Museum staff to decide when the security situation permits reopening, and how much time they want to put into installing the gallery. Saddam would say, ‘Have the galleries installed in one month for my birthday.’ Now they have time to think about the arrangement.”

“The Athens Olympics were supposed to be the moment when the Greeks proved once and for all that they were an efficient European country, and when they shamed the British into handing back the Elgin Marbles. Architecture was critical to their vision, particularly the New Acropolis Museum, planned as a masterly propaganda stroke.” But with the games only months away, many of the Olympics’ most important buildings are nowhere ready…

“An independent survey published today by the Museums Association reveals that museum and gallery staff earn significantly less than all equivalent professions – such as librarians, university lecturers, journalists – and many earn less in real terms than they did 15 years ago. The MA report shows that starting salaries for highly trained curators and conservators can be too small to pay for all the training the job has required.”

More than a million artifacts unearthed in Boston’s Big Dig project are in danger of being lost. “The archeology for the Big Dig was probably the largest archeological project ever conducted in Massachusetts. But the actual discoveries — the sites and their contents — were even more significant because, for the most part, they predated the Revolutionary War. The farther back you go in time, the fewer written documents exist to describe what life was like. We really got an intimate look at the lives of many colonists and Native Americans.”