Category: visual

This year’s Whitney Biennial, writes John Perreault, doesn’t adhere to the premise set out for it in the curators’ catalogue essay. “The current biennial, they write, suggests an art ‘sea change’ as important as that delineated by the 1993 biennial (whatever that change was). The present change seems to have something to do with 9/11, corporate greed and dot-com collapse. Alas, although I enjoy the new biennial a great deal, I don’t think this point is adequately demonstrated either by their text or their exhibition. All three, nevertheless, produced credible single-author essays, leading one to suspect that the introduction is a bit of an exquisite corpse…”

A proposal for Australian artists to receive 3 percent of the resale of art is on the table. “Unlike writers, musicians and composers, Australian artists do not receive royalty – or droit de suite – payments. This means that if an artist’s work is resold at auction, or by an agent or private gallery for more than its original price, artists do not reap the rewards.”

“Aboriginal art is now worth $10 million a year to the salerooms – up from a mere $620,000 a decade ago. But Sotheby’s has been taking 60 per cent or more of the total and its main competitors want to grab their share. Others have tried, however, and failed. And whether there are enough collectors in Australia or overseas to keep five big salerooms running profitably seems highly doubtful.”

“Critics around the world are expressing outrage at the proposed design for the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, which many believe will fatally compromise the setting of the Parthenon. The issue has become so heated that it is thought to have contributed to the downfall of the Greek Government at last weekend’s election.”

Blake Gopnik attempts the Whitney Biennale with a positive attitude: “If art lovers are almost always disappointed by the Whitney’s survey, maybe the problem lies in our expectations rather than in the show itself. Though it features more than 300 works chosen from across the nation in something like nine months, we still somehow imagine that the biennial should be a tight, coherent show of excellent art. In fact, it can never be more than a grab bag of whatever work happens to have been made since the previous edition of the show. Great exhibitions come about when curators identify important art that speaks to them, and then spend many years shaping it into a show that will speak to us. The Whitney Biennial comes about because another two years have gone by and someone’s got to pull something together, fast.”

For a variety of oh-so-obvious reasons, project managers of the new tower to rise above the site of the World Trade Center say they’re building the “safest building in the world.” “In an attempt to live up to that very public promise — to overcome public fear, and reassure prospective tenants — the designers of the tower are carrying out a most unusual exercise that is in equal parts brainstorming, forensic analysis and Götterdämmerung-style what-iffing.”

Miami is now home to some major contemporary art collectors. Some collectors have been so successful in their hording that they’ve even built personal museums for their collections. “When we arrived here Miami was acultural. Now there are all these energies coming together that give it the excitement of a frontier.”

“The arts editor had a brilliant idea. He thought. A weekly series on portraits? I wasn’t so sure. The National Portrait Gallery is my idea of hell. Hard-faced Tudors and luxuriantly eccentric Victorians are great. But the 20th-century galleries make your flesh crawl with their bad paintings, trite photographs, and affirmation that the interest of a portrait lies in its subject rather than creator. The NPG classifies portraits by the person, with the artist’s name second. This is why portraits can seem the opposite of serious art.” And yet…

Last week, the Art Gallery of Ontario’s most important board member and benefactor quit. Disaster. “But this was only the latest in a series of plagues visited on the AGO over the past year. First there was plunging attendance, followed by its consequences: budget cutbacks and a confrontation with its employees’ union. Meanwhile, interminable discussions with Gehry were conducted behind a veil of secrecy befitting the CIA.”

A day after the Greek government ordered a halt to constuction of the Acropolis Museum, “court sources yesterday said that a senior prosecutor has ordered that criminal charges be brought against senior Culture Ministry officials who approved the project.”