Contemporary art is getting noisier. “Almost regardless of medium, today’s art comes with soundtracks, voiceovers, loudly moving parts or interactive elements. The computer and the Internet have brought out the inner polymath in many artists, who often play in bands and now sample and splice sound and music as easily as they once cut and pasted magazine images. Exhibition catalogs incorporate CD’s. Speakers and headsets abound in museums, galleries and art fairs.”
Category: visual
Hubble Paints A Van Gogh
“Scientists say the latest image from the Hubble space telescope bears remarkable similarities to Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night, one of his most famous paintings and renowned for its bold whorls of light sweeping across a raging night sky.”
The Koolhaas Effect – Architecture Of The Unconventional
Architect Rem Koolhaas is involved in aa series of unconventional projects across the globe. “His unorthodox choice of project reflects an impatience with the rules of a profession that he entered only late in life.”
WTC Office Park Design Unveiled
“Design guidelines intended to give three-dimensional form to the World Trade Center redevelopment project – but not quite as exactingly as a draft prepared last year – are now being circulated for comment among planners, architects and officials.” The plans focus on the 5-building office park that will surround the Ground Zero site, an aspect of the plan which lacks the glamour of the Freedom Tower and PATH station which garnered so much attention when they were unveiled several months ago, but which will have much to do with defining the eventual look and feel of the area.
Protests Over Governor-General’s Award
“Some protests were logged yesterday with the Canada Council for the Arts, which recently selected the controversial artist Istvan Kantor (a.k.a. Monty Cantsin) as a winner of the Governor-General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts. Kantor gained notoreity (and a lifetime ban from the National Gallery in Ottawa) for one specialty, using his own blood to paint on gallery walls.” But Council officials insist that the number of protests they’ve heard is minimal, and that media interest is out of proportion to the actual size of the controversy.
Iraq Exploration Will Rewrite The History Books
There are so many archaeological sites in Iraq, and the technology for exploring them has progressed so much that if they are researched in the next decade, they will rewrite what we know about the history of the region. “A decade of research in Iraq could rewrite the books of archaeology, no question. There is just a phenomenal amount of history in this country and much of it is yet to be discovered. But over time it will be and we’ll have to totally rethink what we know.”
Hockney: Photography Is Dead
David Hockney says he believes that photography as an artform is dead. “Hockney says he believes modern photography is now so extensively and easily altered that it can no longer be seen to be true or factual. He also describes art photography as “dull”. Even war photography, once seen as objectively “true”, has now been cast in doubt by the ubiquitous use of digital cameras which produce images that can be easily enhanced or twisted.”
Kandinsky – Prisoner Of Schoenberg?
Kandinsky was very interested in music and admired Schoenberg, write Terry Teachout, “but he was also an idea-besotted intellectual manqué who followed many a half-baked notion down a blind alley, most spectacularly when he embraced theosophy, a pseudo-religion popular at the turn of the 20th century whose amorphous tenets played a part in his own turn to abstraction. Just as theosophy preached the unimportance of the material world, inspiring Kandinsky to portray in his paintings an “immaterial” universe of spiritual “thought-forms,” so did Schoenberg’s break with tonality—a break that Schoenberg himself thought to be historically inevitable—seem to Kandinsky a necessary stage in the larger quest for a spiritual art freed from the shackles of materialism. Both men, however, were mistaken.”
Architect Proposes Huge Moscow Artist Project
A Dutch architect has proposed building “five blocks of luxury flats, each block decorated in the style of a Russian artist. While the mayor backs the project, architectural critics have panned it as another example of the scars millionaires are inflicting on the city’s skyline.”
Preserving The (Recent) Past
The future of the preservationist movement may be evident in a new trend which has seen several relatively “young” and unspectacular buildings saved from the wrecking ball by activists looking to preserve a piece of America’s architectural heritage. “Good contemporary architecture, always a precious resource, is often a victim of the rush to replace. Too new to benefit from the power of nostalgia but already old enough to look dated and shabby, buildings become especially vulnerable when they reach their mid-20s.” The trick, of course, is determining which examples of recent architecture are truly worth fighting for, but that anyone is fighting for them at all is an important step.