Category: visual

Last week a sculpture was “kidnapped” off a London street. “The kidnappers, who call themselves AK47, have headlined their ransom note: “Don’t go breaking my art” – believed to be a cryptic reference to the Elton John/Kiki Dee No 1 hit from 1976. They state: “We are AK47. We have captured Rodin’s Drinker – a conceptual statue by art terrorist Banksy. Is it art or is it kidnap?” A second series of images shows the kidnap taking place. The sculpture has a strip of gaffer tape across his eyes and mouth. It is loaded on to a van and transported to what looks like a warehouse. The final picture is blurred, but it seems to show a hand holding a gun to the statue.”

The trouble with being an artist on the cutting edge is that when you discover that the trend you’re leading has just become a passe fad, it’s easy to become very irrelevant very quickly. “Internet art may have little direct connection to the dot-com financial bubble, but its reputation has suffered as the Internet itself has lost cachet. Many who work in the Internet art world report a sense of digital exhaustion.”

Anish Kapoor is creating a sculpture to the British victims of the Sept. 11 attack on the World Trade Center. The sculpture will be placed in a square near the WTC site. “The sculpture will be crafted from a block of black granite into which a vertical chamber is carved of approximately 1m [3.3ft] by 2.5m [8.2ft] by 80cm [2.6ft]. The inner chamber is polished to give a mirrored surface,” said the Bombay-born artist. The chamber reflects light so as to form a column, which hovers, ghost-like, in the void of the stone.”

“As the McMichael Canadian Art Collection prepares to host its second annual ‘100-per-cent Canadian’ fundraiser tonight at Toronto’s art-moderne masterpiece the Carlu, the art gallery is poised to undergo big changes in the months ahead.” But change is nothing new to the McMichael, which throughout its history has endured seemingly constant and “tumultuous disputes over the gallery’s governance and mission. Everyone, it seems, has gotten in on the debates at one time or another — the McMichaels first and foremost, governments, scholars, artists, art critics, auditors, lawyers, opposition politicians, and the courts.”

In the aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, the looting and ransacking of the Iraq Museum was viewed as a very avoidable tragedy indicative of the inability of the occupying forces to protect the country’s national treasures. But “ten months after its looting, the Iraq Museum has recovered nearly half of the artifacts stolen. Many of those treasures, like the museum itself, are in need of extensive restoration. And a more ambitious goal has emerged, as well: of returning the museum to a role it has not played in a generation, as a center of scholarship and as a place to display Iraq’s priceless archaeological heritage.”

As national tragedies go, the 9/11 terrorist attacks stand out for the visual images left in the minds of everyone who watched the horror unfold, either in person or on television, so the idea of creating a museum to memorialize some of the objects found in the wreckage of the World Trade Center was a natural. But what objects should make the cut? “At the beginning, with memories so fresh and personal and abundant, the most difficult curatorial choices will have to be made. If the museum were to draw on nothing more than the artifacts… that are now stored in Hangar 17 at Kennedy International Airport, it would have to winnow the collection by about 20 percent just to fit in the designated space.”

Where is contemporary art going? Martin Gayford is confused: “Is there a trend in contemporary art? At the moment, it just seems to be getting more and more peculiar. This year’s Turner Prize – won, you may recall, by a transvestite potter – might have seemed slightly outre. But, in comparison with the Beck’s Futures Prize, currently on show at the ICA, the tame old Turner looks positively mainstream.”

Why do museums think it’s a good idea to rehang the art in its collections? “I cannot believe that public understanding of art is increased by the endless shakings-up of displays, to which museums have become addicted. The curators are doing it for themselves: staging convulsions of taste and knowledge that impress their peers. No one nowadays wants to think their job is dull, but looking after a museum collection was, traditionally, one of the staider professions. Not any more. Now everyone is interested in museology, curating is an art form, history is widely recognised as a fiction and new displays have become as integral to public galleries as couture shows to the fashion industry.”

The United Nations is supposed to be a forum for international diplomacy, but over the decades of its existence, it has become something of an accidental museum as well. “As a collector and custodian of art, the United Nations occupies a unique, and uniquely awkward, position. Since much of its authority rests on the sovereign equality of its member nations, it cannot comfortably refuse a gift from any of them. The objects on display are therefore of wildly uneven quality and provenance, and cannot be easily organized in terms of medium, period, style, subject, technique or geographical origin. It is a kaleidoscopic, but not overly coherent, collection.”

“Today, buying art with income from endowments is next to impossible for most museums, even in the world of contemporary art, which used to be considered affordable. As a result, museums that want to grow their holdings must rely on collectors.” But the collector targeted by one museum is likely being wooed by several others as well, and the result of this complicated dance is a curious blend of hypercompetitive gladhanding and subtle begging. Some in the art world bemoan this state of affairs, and long for a return to the days when museums could afford to simply buy the pieces they wanted to display. But some curators seem to live for the thrill of the gentrified chase.