Category: visual

Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts has been up and running for two years now, but something’s still missing. The Kimmel, home to the Philadelphia Orchestra and various other groups, “was supposed to be accessorized with art selected and funded under provisions of the city’s Percent for Art program. However, a number of problems slowed the project considerably, to the point where the seven-member jury tasked with choosing the art is just now entering the final phase of the process.”

“Raylene Decatur, president and chief executive of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, resigned Wednesday after almost nine years of overseeing major and sometimes controversial changes at the 104-year-old institution… More than 30 full-time and part-time employees lost their jobs there in 2002 and 2003 as the museum struggled with the shrinking attendance and a reduction in contributions from the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District… Decatur heard harsh criticism from some former employees and volunteers for the layoffs and the less than pure-science exhibits created during her tenure.”

When your city’s national image is best summed up as “the American answer to Siberia,” how exactly do you go about drawing a crowd of out-of-towners to take notice of your thriving community and impressive cultural scene? Well, if you’re St. Paul, Minnesota, you first arrange to host the National Hockey League’s All-Star Game during the dead of winter. Then, just before the cameras roll, you build an enormous palace out of 27,000 bathtub-sized blocks of ice, right smack in the middle of downtown, and just across the street from the hockey arena. The 2004 Ice Palace is a marvel of art and engineering, and it opens to the public tonight. Oh, and just for the record: the temperature in the Twin Cities this morning was a crisp 13 below zero.

James Cuno, currently director of the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, has been named director of the Art Institute of Chicago. “For nearly 12 years Mr. Cuno was director of the Harvard University Art Museums, a complex that under his leadership doubled the size of its staff and budget and emerged as one of the best smaller museums in the United States. At Harvard in the 1990’s he directed a $37 million capital campaign that ended up raising $55 million.”

Everyone likes a controversy story, and that’s why the Israeli ambassador’s vandalism of artwork in Stockholm gets attention. But this is a silly story. “It’s horrible, it’s sick, but I can’t for one moment accept that it is an apology for a suicide bomber. Everyone interprets art differently. That’s what makes it art. If this were a propaganda work, the museum would have a case to answer – maybe. But it’s not. It’s in very poor taste, if you like, but is there a tasteful way to talk about terrorism? About people disintegrating into bits of flesh? Which is what, to me, that chunky pool suggests.”

A show of contemporary British art is being shown in Iran. The art has been carefully chosen in hopes of not offending Iranians. “The exhibition is being held at the invitation of Hamid Reza Sami-Azar, the director of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, established by the Shah before the founding of the Islamic republic. Among his collection are some works, including a Francis Bacon, which have never been exhibited. In the more relaxed atmosphere that followed the election of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, in 1997, the museum has become a popular meeting place for young artists and students.”

What will become of the le Marchand ivory cameos stolen last week from the Art Gallery of Ontario? “The image of big illicit business in freshly harvested antiquities, theft to order, the encouragement of site looting for profit, and money laundering is today mainly restricted to the pages of improbable detective novels.”

Roger Kimball sympathizes with the Israeli ambassador to Sweden who attacked a piece of art in Stockholm last weekend. But was he justified in attacking it? “I think not. His outrage at “Snow White” was understandable, even exemplary, but he should not have destroyed or defaced the exhibition. There were many steps open to him short of violence. To vandalize an art work–even a bad art work, even a morally reprehensible art work–is to adopt the tactics of the enemies of culture.”

Five le Marchand ivory cameos were stolen from the Art Gallery of Ontario this week. The pieces are so well-known, it’s likely the thieves will have difficulty selling them. Art theft is said to be rare in Canada. “Observers say it’s likely about 150 art works, antiques or artifacts are stolen or reported stolen each year in Canada from galleries and homes. The return rate tends to be less than 20 per cent.”

It’s a romantic notion, the idea that the Parthenon Marbles could be returned to the Acropolis, writes Richard Dorment. “Credulous, idealistic or simply out of touch with reality, many are romantics smitten with the idea that the marbles can somehow be “returned” to the Parthenon, which is in fact a total ruin. Not perhaps realising that half of the Parthenon sculptures have been lost for ever, and that surviving sections are now in 10 museums in eight countries, they imagine that, if only Britain would co-operate with Greece, the frieze could somehow be reconstructed.” They are wrong.