Category: visual

In Europe there is more and more serious interest in presenting Islamic art. The Louvre is spending $60 million on new Islamic art galleries, and in London, the Victoria & Albert Museum is introducing a new Islamic wing. “Obviously, this has a political dimension. It’s a way of saying we believe in the equality of civilizations. Many immigrant youths do not fully adhere to our culture, nor do they know their own culture of origin. It’s good to show that the republic respects, displays and studies this culture.”

The Brooklyn Museum will soon reopen after a $63 million overhaul. “The project includes a new lobby, a multistoried new front entrance pavilion and a breathtaking public plaza with dancing-water fountains, cherry trees and a “front stoop” of public seating, all of it extending a common-people-friendly welcome mat to the borough of Brooklyn.”

The Utah Museum of Fine Arts has returned a small painting – “Les Jeunes Amoureux” by François Boucher to the son of the man it was looted from in Paris. It was “part of a collection of hundreds that disappeared after a Jewish art dealer, Andre Jean Seligmann, fled with his family to the United States. The painting was donated to the Utah Museum of Fine Arts by a collector in 1993.”

Artist Tracey Emin has patched up things with the class of eight-year-olds she’s been battling with the past week. “After demanding the return of an artwork she made with a group of eight-year-old pupils, Ms Emin has now told the school it can keep it – and has offered to pay the cost of a frame.”

“Protecting antiquities remains a low priority for both the Iraqi and the occupation authorities, according to Iraqis and foreigners involved. Archaeological sites in Iraq have been looted since the end of the Persian Gulf war in 1991, often with the involvement of the government of Saddam Hussein. But in the lawless aftermath of the current conflict, thieves invaded Iraq’s archaeological sites in large numbers and stole artifacts from the ancient buried cities of Mesopotamia. Almost a year later, thieves continue to plunder the sites and to erase the tangible record of the world’s earliest civilizations.”

The first drafts of art history are written not by the art historians, but by those in the business of art – the dealers and collectors. But how is it that some artists/art works grab a toe-hold in this world, while others fail? The Getty is in the middle of a year-long exploration…

An American lawyer is suing for $1 billion to recover art looted by the Nazis. “The suit, brought by a new group calling itself the Association of Holocaust Victims for the Restitution of Artwork and Masterpieces, calls on two leading Austrian banks, the Austrian government and Sotheby’s auction house to return paintings and other works allegedly sold without the permission of their original Jewish owners. ‘Not one painting has been restored — not one,’ Edward Fagan said, contending the missing artworks include paintings by Monet, Cezanne, Delacroix and other Impressionist masters. ‘These victims are suing to recover their property’.”

“The World Monuments Fund and the Getty Conservation Institute are to collaborate with Iraq’s Ministry of Culture and State Board of Antiquities and Heritage to repair the damage sustained as a result of the 2003 war. The initiative will not deal with the restoration or protection of Iraq’s museums, but with endangered buildings and archaeological sites. The goal is to mobilise international resources to help repair Iraq’s cultural heritage and to help build the infrastructure and expertise that are required in the country’s conservation and heritage management sectors.”

City downtowns are the accumulation of building ideas that survive to be built. But there’s a shadow history too – the buildings that for one reason or another didn’t make it past the idea stage. “Lost opportunities like that make you cringe, and there are others, including unbuilt residential towers that blow away the monotonous condo high-rises now deadening the cityscape.”

Minimalism seems to be everywhere these days, including a new retrospective show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. “Someone might surmise from all this that Minimalism’s time has come, but it has always been around in architecture, music, dance, theater, literature, the ascetic impulse hard-wired in us. That is an implicit message of “A Minimal Future?,” which includes Dan Graham’s 1966 photographs of postwar tract housing, all of it identical except differently colored, illustrating how the Minimalist aesthetic of serial form is just out there, waiting to be noticed.”