Category: visual

Canadian journalist Sarah Milroy visits the Whitney Biennial looking for the state of the American soul, and finds an awful lot of anxious uncertainty: “If I had to choose a word for the show it would be ‘tremulous’ — a tremulous biennial for a time of dramatic change, trauma and anxiety. A sense of fragility and flux prevails, reflecting the United States’ sense of an uncertain future and its own unsteady place in the international arena.”

“In 1993, two computer scientists devised a Java applet (PDF) to make energy fields not only visible, but really rad-looking. Each year, John Belcher at MIT holds the ‘Weird Fields’ contest among his physics students to see who can use the program to create the most aesthetically pleasing image by writing simple formulas for electromagnetism.” The point isn’t to create the most useful or efficient formula – just to come up with the one that looks the best. So what’s the point? None, really, but Belcher believes firmly that his students benefit from a well-rounded approach to the world, and if that means using science to get them to create art, so be it.

Archaeologists are protesting the British government’s plan to build a £200 million 2.1km tunnel tunnel under Stonehenge. They charge that the project will result in “irreversible damage to the World Heritage site”.

“London is home to many of the world’s leading dealers, auction houses and museums, and Britain accounts for a quarter of the global art market worth $23.5 billion a year. But until now the city has never tried to promote its huge range and depth of expertise cohesively. That will change today, with the announcement of a major new initiative to celebrate London’s unique place in the international art market.”

Jerry Saltz visits the Whitney Biennial and comes away whistling ho-hum. “The art world is dying to like the 2004 Whitney Biennial. The opening was a lovefest. Previews in magazines and newspapers essentially implored, ‘Can’t we all just get along and love the biennial?’ Nearly all trotted out the cliché ‘the show everyone loves to hate.’ Disliking exhibitions is seen by some to be disloyal or obstructionist. This is traceable to the fact that in America today criticism and even civil disagreement are implicitly discouraged.”

The Smithsonian has announced that Norman Foster has been selected to design a huge glass canopy that will enclose the courtyard of the Old Patent Office Building in Washington DC. “The building, which is home to the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and the National Portrait Gallery, is undergoing a top-to-bottom renovation.”

A new survey reports that “half the Swiss population visits a museum at least once a month. A quarter of those polled said they had attended an exhibition at least ten times in the past six months.”

Berlin is a great art city. But its Biennial is oh so wrong. “The biennial is subtitled Complex Berlin, and it is a complicated affair. It supposedly deals with the city itself; with politics, economics, club scenes, subcultures and “sonic scapes”; the city as a leitmotif, migration as a metaphor, division, history, integration and paradox. You get more sense of this, of course, walking Berlin, doing the Walter Benjamin thing, losing yourself. This biennial is a grind.”

“A row has broken out among the guardians of Britain’s cultural heritage over the proposed destruction of an acclaimed series of Victorian paintings on a ceiling at the Royal Academy of Art, to “reveal” an earlier masterpiece.”

Judges have chosen the statue of a pregnant victim of thalidomide to occupy the fourth vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London. “Alison Lapper says her portrait, by the artist Marc Quinn, is ‘naked, pregnant and proud’. Her portrait, made when she was eight months pregnant, was chosen last night by the judges to be created on a monumental scale, 4.5 metres high (15ft) in white marble, and take its place among the bronze generals and grubby pigeons on the fourth plinth which, despite more than 150 years of arguing, has been empty since the square was created.”