Category: visual

The Parthenon Marbles are deteriorated and “strewn across 10 museums in eight countries” and wouldn’t give much of a sense of their original condition even if they were reunited. But the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies is scanning the fragments and recreating them in full as computer models. “It has produced 152 high-resolution models of the sculptures, and produced images which show each in its original position.”

How is the value of art determined? “Scholars, critics, researchers and historians all shape the value of art. You think you are pure, but you give an expertise and you are participating in the market. Your assessment of quality, authenticity or attribution makes you a player, like it or not. You go to graduate school and think about truth and beauty, but there’s this whole other world that affects the truth-and-beauty factor.”

“Zaha Hadid, whose dynamic designs often seem to defy laws of gravity, has won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor. It is the first time the prize has been given to a woman in the award’s 25-year history.”

“Today, many architects – bored of straight lines and right angles on the one hand, and of the kitsch post-modern design that did so much to dumb down city skylines in the 1980s on the other – have decided that they want to be Picasso, too. They want to imbue matter-of-fact buildings like office blocks and blocks of flats with the spirit of the great artist and sculptor.”

Charles Saatchi’s new show is jammed full of art. “An emporium is what it feels like – piled high, stacked deep. If one more work was tacked to one more inch of wood-panelled wall, the building would surely collapse. The central pantheon that guarantees the box office remains more or less intact: the shark, the dung, Myra and the bloody head, dead dad and the famously unmade bed. But all the other rooms, halls and corridors are jammed. By my count, there are more than a hundred new works on display, plus several more classics from Saatchi’s collection. You get three shows for the price of a ticket.”

Three American museums – in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles – are joining forces to “acquire finished works together and to organize shows as the cost of buying art and producing exhibitions has risen.”

Three years ago France opened up its art markets to foreign sellers, ending a long-standing ban on foreign auction houses operating there. Many predicted that in the new era, the big international auction houses would swamp the French firms. “However, the reality has proved very different and in less than two and a half years Paris has evolved into the world’s most unpredictable and fiercely competitive art market centre.”

Jack Vettriano – the self-taught Scottish painter – is a hugely popular artist in the UK. But no public museums have interest in showing his work. Why? “The proposition that Vettriano cannot be slotted into a spectrum of art that runs from Titian to Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas is just risible. Why Pop Art but not Popular Art? If the National Theatre can reinvent itself by staging popular musicals and also populist shows like Jerry Springer – the Opera, then why cannot our galleries do likewise?”

“This year’s Whitney Biennial may have escaped serious censure in part because there’s no one at the Whitney to kick around anymore. In keeping with its sorry tradition of revolving-door directors, the museum lost its former head, Maxwell Anderson, last September and its affable new one, Adam Weinberg, bears no responsibility for this survey’s selections. No one has yet been churlish enough to pummel the triumvirate of earnest, low-profile young female curators who made this year’s picks.”

“Nowadays London’s Royal Academy, for all its clever rebranding as friend to the Hirst generation, is a silly place: its summer show a trite exercise, its courting of the rich and famous (the newly restored rooms at its home, Burlington House, have been named after the man who gave the most money) a little crass, its style always tending to the posh and the phony. Yet the opening display from its art collection in the Fine Rooms is a powerful reminder that the Royal Academy once mattered, that it was once revolutionary.”