Category: visual

Civic boosters for years have been trying to transform Grand Street downtown into a proper city center. Yet another plan as emerged – this one to cost $1.3 billion. Will it succeed? “Paris has its Champs Élysées. New York has its Rockefeller Center, Times Square and Central Park. Now, Los Angeles will have at its center a grand boulevard and urban park.”

The Brooklyn Museum’s $63 million makeover goes far in redefining the museum’s face to the world, write Ariella Budick and Justin Davidson. “Its new face represents not just an institutional rebirth but also a full- blown Brooklyn Renaissance.”

“With the completion of the Brooklyn Museum’s new entrance pavilion, the city has gained one of the most attractive public spaces to be found anywhere in town. It will be fascinating to watch as the neighborhood discovers how to use it.”

“After a protracted identity crisis, the Brooklyn Museum has decided that local, not global, is the direction it should take. Rather than struggling in vain to put itself on the map for a Manhattan audience, it is joining the campaign to make a gentrified Brooklyn the place to be. The museum points to its new front entrance on Eastern Parkway as evidence of this grassroots connection. So, too, is “Open House,” which, in its casual way, posits Brooklyn-ness as a cultural ethnicity.”

One of the last grand hotels in central London is in danger of being torn down. “The 89-year-old, French baroque Regent Palace – built and still run as a “people’s palace” hotel only 30 seconds’ walk from Piccadilly Circus – would be replaced by a modern block of offices and shops under a £400m scheme put forward by the crown estate.”

Most people wouldn’t think of a subway car as artistic inspiration, but apparently, there are more than a few individuals who do. “It turns out that New York’s subways have long been associated with art, and have themselves even been considered art, ever since the first IRT train rolled down the tracks in 1904.” From the subway’s original turnstiles to long-forgotten ads exhorting the public to use the service, to the stations themselves (no, not all of them,) art is everywhere in the New York underground, if you can just see through the grime.

The curator of contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum has resigned in order to study for her Ph.D. at nearby Emory University. Carrie Przybilla had been at the High Museum since 1988, and was responsible for the acquisition of an importantg collection of Ellsworth Kelly paintings, which will have their own gallery in the new building being constructed for the High. The museum will conduct a national search for a new curator.

“As fine art’s conceptual leanings are increasingly difficult to distinguish from the facile surfaces of advertising, this ironic fusion of art and commerce is perhaps an inevitable progression.
Yet, despite the irony, fine art is faced with a very real problem presented by a rapidly evolving technological world, which means, in effect, a rapidly changing commercial world. What actually distinguishes “fine” art from the advertising techniques that it parodies and appropriates?”

“The game of what-ifs in architecture is addictive. The organisers of a new Hayward Gallery touring exhibition had the brilliant idea of exploring the never-never land of building, drawing on the collections of the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Victoria and Albert museum. So many of these visions are a great deal more exciting than the buildings we actually got.”

“The discovery of 13,000-year-old rock paintings in Nottinghamshire last year rewrote ice-age history in Britain. Today, archaeologists from all over Europe are in Creswell to discuss how the finds form part of a continent-wide culture known as the Magdalenian.”