Category: visual

Sydney artist Craig Ruddy has won the $35,000 Archibald Prize with his portrait of Aboriginal actor David Gulpilil. “Ruddy, who said he had wanted to paint Gulpilil for several years, is hoping the prize doesn’t affect his work.”

Tyler Green writes that the Whitney Biennial is a fundamentally flawed enterprise. “The irony of the Whitney Biennial is that it brings a muddled exhibit of contemporary art to the city that needs it least. The Whitney’s formula is especially tired: The Biennial most often takes already familiar art and simply institutionalizes it. No one deserves to be confronted with 108 artists in a single show; the exceptional artists suffer for being mixed in with the soon-to-be-forgotten middle, and in the end it all begins to blur. So here is how the Whitney Biennial can become the most important show of contemporary art not just in New York, but in America: Trim the Whitney Biennial down to eight to 12 truly fantastic artists.”

An enormous head from a statue of Saddam Husein has landed in the Scottish city of Aberdeen. “Since the head is thought to be the only one of its kind in Britain, museum officials are calling its arrival a coup for the city. But many citizens are outraged, accusing the museum of war looting. Weighing almost 136 kilograms, the head is from a statue believed to have come from the city of Basra, a British stronghold during the war.”

The Catholic church is financially devastated in Massachusetts after the chuch’s sex abuse scandals, and closing many churches. “The architectural landscape of Eastern Massachusetts, dominated in so many communities by church steeples and bell towers, is at risk of being diminished as the region’s largest religious denomination, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston, prepares to shutter a significant number of parishes, preservationists say.”

Collector/gallery owner Charles Saatchi is being investigated by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) for allegedly monopolising the art market. “Charles Thomson, a gallery owner who has made it his mission to burst the BritArt bubble, has now taken the extraordinary step of submitting a formal complaint to the OFT. He claims that Mr Saatchi’s pre-eminent commercial position as the key patron of dozens of young artists is monopolistic and anti-competitive.”

Wonder where those items confiscated from airline passengers at security checkpoints end up? An artist bought a few hundred pounds of the items and made art out of them. “In the massive Plexiglas case, wrapped in a heavy chain Maloney bought at Home Depot and hand-painted a rust color, are deer antlers, a tuning wrench for bongo drums still in its plastic case, his and her handcuffs, knitting needles, a decorative diaper pin, metal brushes, hair picks, a painted horseshoe, knives and forks, tweezers, meat thermometers and fishing hooks along with the lines and sinkers.”

Museums need to find new strategies for operating, writes Adrian Ellis. “Just as public collections will be reshaped over the next quarter century by the converging demands for restitution from an ever growing and more sophisticated set of parties, so the tensions between the enormous financial value of collections and the lack of liquidity of the institutions that own them are likely to manifest themselves in increasingly strange ways. The sector’s response to restitution shows every sign of being piecemeal, defensive and ultimately damaging to its long term standing in the eyes of the wider community in which museums operate.”

The Vancouver Art Gallery wants to expand, but that is a complicated proposition. The museum’s current site has little additional room, and there is no obvious alternative location. “The gallery, the fifth largest in the country, has a permanent collection of more than 8,000 works worth $100-million. But right now there isn’t enough space to show the permanent collection, which includes extensive holdings of Emily Carr and of conceptual photography.”

“The Art Gallery of Ontario’s “plans for a spectacular transformation, designed by the great architect Frank Gehry, have been put into limbo. The angry defection of long-time benefactor and board member Joey Tanenbaum has set off a chain reaction — resulting in waves of emotional and angry debate about what the AGO should do. At the moment, there is a long lineup of unhappy people.”

Was Cezanne misunderstood? “Given his reservations about modernity, the grouchy old man might not be pleased to hear that he has since been generally accepted as the first modern painter. Would the iconoclast have preferred Mary Cassatt’s judgement that public taste had been perverted by him?”