Category: visual

When Lewis Sharp arrived as director of the Denver Art Museum in 1989, the talent for a good museum was in place but not realized. In the past 15 years, Sharp has transformed the museum, and raised $63 million for an addition designed by Daniel Libeskind. “I hope that the building will allow us to create such a presence within this community and within the country that the Denver Art Museum will not be overlooked. Simply by the presence of that building, people will say, ‘When you go out to the American West, you ought to go to Denver and see that incredible building by Daniel Libeskind.”‘

This year’s Whitney Biennial is a hit with public and press alike, says Peter Goddard, “because some of it reflects a new kind of thinking about art. But that brings us back to glamorizing. Is there such a word? There should be, to point to how much otherwise indescribable stuff is going on at the Whitney Museum of American Art.” In addition to the new embrace of art that’s hard to “get,” there is also a distinct sense of generational turnover about the Biennial, and the subtle air of competition between young and old, old and new, has given the whole event a feeling of renewed vigor.

“At first glance, it is an apartment building like countless others around the world. A medium-height slab made of concrete and glass, it occupies an anonymous site surrounded by parking lots and a shopping mall. Appearances can be deceiving. This is Unité d’habitation, arguably the most famous apartment building ever constructed. Designed by Le Corbusier, the celebrated and enormously influential apostle of modernism, this is the building that would save mankind and lead us into the future.” What it actually did was lead urban planners around the U.S. “to an appalling and unprecedented urban sterility and homogeneity.”

Madrid’s Prado Museum is getting more independence and flexibility in the management of its affairs. “These Spanish moves follow similar initatives in France designed to give greater autonomy to State museums: since January the Louvre has kept all revenues from ticket sales—previously 45% went to the State—and it is now entirely responsible for its exhibition policies and budgets. Previously, both of these had been managed by the government.”

“In Germany, you don’t have to shell out thousands of dollars to live with an original Andy Warhol. As you would a book from the library, you can check out original art from one of 140 publicly funded “art libraries,” or artotheken. Born in the 1960s to increase Germans’ contact with art, “art libraries” are now an established tool of municipal cultural policy, and one which, for many, act as a door opener.”

Some of Iraq’s most valuable antiquities are deteriorating in storage. “The exquisitely carved Nimrud Ivories have been suffering from dampness, following flooding by sewage-contaminated water last April, during the fighting. It is now clear that this has already caused some fragmentation and mould.”

In recent years museums have become more and more involved with arts education. “To all those of us who value museums and education this may seem like a good thing. But on closer examination there is cause for concern. There are problems with spelling out and dictating a relationship between museums and education. There should be no school ties.”

Greece’s highest court has ruled that work can proceed on a museum at the Acropolis. “Court sources said the Council of State dismissed arguments that construction work would damage ancient building remains found on the plot earmarked for the 94-million-euro museum.”

Next February, Central Park will be home to a Christo and Jeanne-Claude. “After two and a half decades of refining the work and banging on official doors for a hearing, they are about — thanks to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s approval — to achieve their goal, with a project called “The Gates.” It is logistically one of the team’s most complicated to date, and certainly, at 25 years, the longest in gestation.”

How do you judge Christo and Jean-Claude’s project to build gates in Central Park? Is it “possible for the project, once completed, to fail aesthetically. Is there a wrong way to arrange 7,500 gates in Central Park? If not, then in what sense is its realization an artistic success? Proposition: If difference in a work of art does not affect its value as art, then maybe it isn’t art to begin with. If Beethoven had written di-di-di-deem rather than di-di-di-dum, the result would have been not merely different but discernibly worse. If Shakespeare had written “Should I or shouldn’t I” rather than “To be or not to be,” the result would have been not merely different but worse. And if Raphael had painted Plato and Aristotle out of proportion with the rest of the figures in The School of Athens, or if he’d painted Aristotle gesturing up and Plato gesturing down, rather than vice-versa, the result would have been not merely different but worse.”