Category: visual

“In a handful of pierced seashells found in a South African cave, scientists believe that they have discovered the world’s oldest known jewelry and the earliest reliable evidence of creative symbolic thought at work.”

Washington DC’s Renwick Gallery has hung paintings in the way of old – stacked one atop another, cheek by jowl. “They knew how to blow minds back then. And their trick still works. Paintings palpitate inches apart, in skylit orgies of imagery that revives the now-forgotten aesthetics of the sublime, in particular the sublime of being overwhelmed and transported by sheer mass: by Niagara Falls, by world’s fairs or by molding-encrusted public rooms crammed with oil paintings — everything that the puritans of modernism would oppose.”

Winning a high-profile competition to design a public building is as much a campaign as a proposal of ideas. Mary Voelz Chandler observes the process of choosing an architect for the new Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver. “It’s not a comparison of negatives, but a comparison of positive matches with the organization’s goals. All these people could deliver a beautiful building.”

“Reports this week of a conflict at the Royal Academy between the head of exhibitions, Norman Rosenthal, and the secretary, Lawton Fitt, may be the most serious crisis a British gallery has faced since 1988, when an inexperienced director at the V&A caused an international outcry by dismissing five of the museum’s senior keepers.” Richard Dorment observes that “the president and council of the Royal Academy would be mad even to contemplate sacking a man of Rosenthal’s stature. Is it possible that they have forgotten what he has done for the Academy – or, for that matter, done for this country?”

What makes a Van Gogh painting worth $82.5 million and another good painting worth millions and millions less? “The art world has capitalized on the fact that most people believe they can’t really understand why a work of art is worth what the market is asking. It helps to realize that the process of setting value is different for dead artists such as Van Gogh, whose works now trade more like commodities, and living artists, whose worth is still being determined, particularly if they are young.”

The Affordable Art Show movement is taking off. The shows are “now a regular event in London and New York and six months ago he tested the water in Sydney, attracting 13,000 visitors and selling more than $4 million worth of art. Now it’s Melbourne’s turn, with the Royal Exhibition Building playing host to works from 120 galleries, 500 artists – and nothing more than $5000.”

The plundering of archaeological sites, tombs and churches for pre-Columbian and colonial objects in Latin America is now so widespread that officials are now saying that “these antiquities can be considered the art world’s endangered species. ‘Countries in Latin America are deprived of their history at an alarming rate’.”

The Bellevue Art Museum (just outside of Seattle) has decided to postpone its reopening from July until October. “The museum closed last September after nearly running out of cash. That came less than three years after the museum moved with much fanfare into a new, $23 million building in the heart of downtown Bellevue.”

“As works of art and artifacts continue to disappear from Indian temples, smaller museums, art galleries, and from the country’s numerous palaces, often with the help of local communities, India is fast turning out to be a rich and inexpensive picking ground for antiques. It is easy to get hold of a piece of Indian history: all one needs to do is visit the souvenir shops.”

Efforts are beginning to save the wreck of the Titanic as an underwater museum. “Hundreds of tourists and salvagers, explorers and moviemakers, have assailed the Titanic since the team of American and French scientists discovered its resting place more than two miles down. Partly as a result, the vessel, the world’s most famous shipwreck, is rapidly falling apart. ‘The world’s oceans are the museums of the deep. It is in the interest of all peoples to protect and conserve both wrecks of recent history as well as submerged sites of antiquity’.”