Category: visual

The British Council is on a cultural offensive in Iran. The Brits are putting together a show of art. “Contentious works, including a Hirst sculpture incorporating a human skeleton never exhibited before, will go on show in Tehran next month, just after elections that have already caused bitter tensions between Islamic hard-liners and liberals. Other works were held back by the British Council, however, including body casts by Antony Gormley and a wheelchair with knives by Mona Hatoum.”

Where are the new collectors? “Finding them has proved more difficult in an age when collecting is less fashionable than it was and there are plenty of alternative ways of spending disposable income. But last week, London’s first major art fair of 2004 underwent a radical overhaul in an attempt to bring in new, younger buyers.”

The Tate has acquired the contents of Francis Bacon’s chaotic studio, after a decade of controversy about it. “Art world legend insists that when Bacon died in 1992 the Tate was offered the studio by his heir and last companion, John Edwards, who died in Thailand last year. The gallery is said to have rejected the offer and the room, with every scrap of paper and cigarette stub forensically recorded, went to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, where it is a popular exhibit. The history of the material donated to the Tate is as eccentric as the artist.”

The row between Sweden and Israel over the Israeli ambassador’s attack on artwork in Stockholm is escalating. “The artistic director of the museum, which is keeping the work on display, has reportedly been attacked. Artist Dror Feiler, who is also said to have been threatened, said the envoy’s actions made reconciliation harder. He told the BBC World Service that his work was “absolutely not” a glorification of suicide bombers as had been claimed and criticised Zvi Mazel for a “stupid act”.

The French government is considering whether to turn over ownership of half of its monuments to regional governments. “The move is part of a wider trend towards decentralisation. Almost 400 monuments throughout France are owned by the ministry; many were nationalised following the French Revolution.”

The US Customs unit set up in 2000 to investigate stolen art has been subsumed into the Department of Homeland Security. “The agents who had concentrated exclusively on tracking and seizing smuggled art have now been redeployed to investigate cases related to the war on terrorism and financial fraud. Although cases of stolen art will still be investigated by Customs agents, no employees will work exclusively on art investigations.”

Greece has built a new museum in hopes of getting the Parthenon Marbles back from London. “But the structure intended to settle a controversy has become an object of controversy itself. The design clashes with the setting, some critics say. It jeopardizes an archaeological site, others claim. And perhaps most dispiritingly, the Olympic deadline is hopelessly out of reach. Like an athlete who trains for a lifetime and then sprains her ankle the week before the games, the New Acropolis Museum may have missed its best chance to make an impression. When the Olympic torch is lighted on Aug. 13, the museum will look like something that Athens already has plenty of: a giant excavation.”

Choosing a plan for the WTC memorial was an arduous task for the project’s jury. “With 5,201 entries to consider, the original strategy was for the submissions to be divided among three groups of jurors. The jury decided, though, that every juror would look at every board, including some 400 that had been disqualified on technicalities.”

Revisions to the WTC memorial are creating an interesting conversation on design function. “When the site is complete, it will form the backdrop for aesthetic conversations between youth and experience; between the logic of the corporate world and that of the avant-garde; and, we found out this week, between minimalist abstraction and literal narrative.”

Salvatore Settis argues that returning the Elgin Marbles to Greece would distort history and shouldn’t be considered. “The Acropolis is the result of an operation that eliminated its Christian and Ottoman past. In order to reconstruct what is only one of the various possible forms of the Acropolis, all other forms are negated; this process would be crowned and legitimised by the return of the marbles. It would sanction the idea that of all the history that has flowed through the Acropolis (in fact, the history of Europe), only one moment matters and all others must be suppressed.”