Category: visual

To Lisa Rochon, the new AGO design looks as if someone told Frank Gehry that he needed to tone down his act a bit. The 600-foot canopy lacks the swoop and sense of motion we’ve come to associate with Gehry, and “his deft meshing of volumes is nowhere to be found in the big, hulking box that rises 140 feet… at the southern back of the gallery.” Many of the design’s limitations seem to have been budget-driven, but Rochon is buoyed by Gehry’s declaration that the design is still, at some level, a work in progress.

“Blaming ‘the economy and the Xbox,’ officials said Wednesday that more than half of Chicago’s biggest museums suffered attendance drops last year, with the Field Museum and the Museum of Science and Industry down by double digits.” Some museums which saw increases in attendance could trace the surge to one or more ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions it put on in the last year. Most museum officials seem to agree that the central problem for arts organizations is that people are given so many entertainment choices today that no one organization can count on luring in huge numbers of patrons.

An East London gallery is soliciting art from graphic artists, designers, and filmmakers for a new exhibition. Anyone who responds to the request will likely have his/her work displayed, but only if the art is sent, as requested, by e-mail or CD. Not surprisingly, a computer company is sponsoring the project, and recently installed thousands of dollars of printers, projectors, and other equipment there. “When a piece of art is received, via e-mail or on a CD, it is printed out on huge machines, mounted, then hung on the wall for all to enjoy.”

When Adam Weinberg was announced as the new head of the Whitney Museum of American Art, observers could only wonder at the task ahead of the soft-spoken man who had just accepted the top job at one of the world’s most tumultuous museums. “After more than a decade of crises and turmoil… the Whitney has entered what Mr. Weinberg said was a ‘period of healing.’ And while he said he did not want to appear to be a ‘New Age director,’ curators say his two favorite words are holistic and synergy.” Still, Weinberg can’t play Mr. Nice Guy forever, and most expect that some major personnel changes are in the offing.

“When the 2004 Biennial opens this spring, the often controversial survey of contemporary art will extend well beyond the walls of the Whitney Museum of American Art. There will be art from one end of Central Park to the other, including grotesque sculptures of werewolf heads, a ferocious life-size tiger, a bronze bust of Michael Jackson and a 50-foot-tall inflatable pink rubber ketchup bottle topped with a snowmanlike head.”

“The US dollar’s decline has boosted the US art market, with collectors increasingly inclined to buy at the big New York auctions where they can pick up pieces more cheaply… Because of the strong euro, works from European collections that would normally fuel the US market are now more costly for a New York investor. On top of this, insurance costs have rocketed. Both factors are tending to choke off the transfer of artworks to the US, although demand there remains strong.”

The Swedish prime minister’s office has been deluged with thousands of e-mails protesting a Stockholm art exhibition which includes an installation piece the e-mailers view as anti-Semitic. The work, which features a photo of a Palestinian suicide bomber floating in a sea of blood, was vandalized by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden last week, and ever since, Israeli organizations around the world have been blasting the Swedish government for allowing the exhibition to proceed. The latest group to join the fray is the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization which has been urging its supporters to send the protest e-mails.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has abruptly cancelled its annual $1000-per-ticket Valentine Ball fundraiser, stunning many area arts patrons who had already bought tickets. The ball, which would have been 28 years old this year, was apparently the victim of financial considerations, with museum officials saying that the event would not have raised enough money to be worthwhile. But “at SFMOMA, where the loyalties of key donors are divided and squabbles among trustees are not uncommon, some patrons privately question whether there is more to the story. Word is that those involved with the preparations knew months ago that the party was seriously underfunded and should have been canceled then.”

When your museum is unveiling a major expansion plan with Frank Gehry at the controls, it is supposed to be an unabashedly celebratory occasion. But for the Art Gallery of Ontario, today’s news conference will be a decidedly mixed bag of architectural grandeur and political damage control. The Gehry design will doubtless wow the critics with “a spectacular multi-story tower extending the AGO into Grange Park on its south side and bringing the park visually into the gallery.” But questions about the AGO’s decision to completely scrap its last expansion plan, as well as charges that the gallery is unilaterally pulling out of a 1989 agreement that it would never again expand, are sure to overshadow the proceedings.