Category: visual

London’s buildings and monuments are lit up this season with projected images, transforming the architecture into fantasy objects.

The North Carolina town of Rocky Mount wanted to erect a statue to Martin Luther King as a tribute to the fact that Dr. King gave one of the first versions of his “I have a dream” speech. But the sculpture has been problematic – townspeople objected to the likeness of the statue, the sculptor has been protested, and…

Is survival of the Barnes Collection depandant on moving to downtown Philadelphia? Another “solution” has been proposed by art dealer James Maroney. “The plan, which Maroney considers a form of legal “tenancy in common,” appears relatively simple: A selected number of Barnes’ paintings, not currently on display, would be sold to interested art collectors for the duration of the buyers’ lifetimes, but returned to the Barnes Foundation upon their deaths. Maroney said that the novel plan would raise money while imposing less “damage to Dr. Barnes’ vision than certain other proposals … .”

Why did we end up with such bad designs for the WTC memorial, wonders Jerry Saltz. “How could something so important and sensitive, something so in need of an inspired touch and more time, go so wrong, so quickly? To answer this we need to look back to a month after September 11, when the air was still acrid with the smell of the smoldering wreckage, and the managerial mindset that brought us to this point surfaced. At a packed assembly of architects in Cooper Union’s Great Hall, professionals from all over the globe met and listened to dozens of their own speak about the tragedy in ways I hadn’t heard before or, thankfully, since. I love contemporary architecture, but I was appalled by the breathtaking opinion, expressed by many in attendance, that architects were the only ones who understood the site ‘in the deepest sense’.”

“Monet was the National Galleries’ big hit. You might have thought we knew Monet well enough, but no fewer than 170,000 people visited the Monet exhibition to get a fresh insight into his work. It was the biggest attendance ever for an exhibition in Edinburgh and it must be a comment on something that we have not been doing in between that the previous record of 120,000 visitors was held by the Epstein exhibition in Waverley Market more than 40 years ago.”

A holiday project to project images on buildings in London has hit a snag. “The project began with the projection of sunflowers onto the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner on December 2 and has grown slowly, culminating with the illumination of Buckingham Palace tonight. All 10 buildings in the scheme will then be lit up each evening until New Year’s Eve. But pictures commissioned by pop star Damon Albarn – one of many celebrities taking part at the request of co-organiser Bob Geldof – proved too contentious to be projected onto London venues such as the National Theatre.”

The uneasy agreement between Daniel Libeskind and David Childs that resulted in the new Freedom Tower design unveiled last Friday was “the result of a whirlwind of intense, sometimes fiery meetings over the course of the last week. During most of that time, staffers from studio Daniel Libeskind were banned from the 40 Wall Street offices of [Skidmore, Owings and Merrill,] where the two camps had been working. As a result, both sides were barely speaking to one another.” In fact, Skidmore staffers accused Libeskind employees of “a Watergate-style break-in,” with Libeskind’s camp accusing of David Childs of intentionally diverging from the agreed-upon framework for the design. All in all, it’s something of a wonder that a design was ever agreed upon.

London’s Royal Academy of Arts has acknowledged that the death mask of JMW Turner, one of the Academy’s most prized possessions, may have been stolen more than 15 years ago, with no one at the museum noticing the mask’s disappearance until another institution asked to borrow it in 2002. However, it is also possible that the mask is still somewhere in the Academy’s vast collection, and staffers are hoping to turn it up during an ongoing cataloguing project.

Critics hated the Royal Academy’s show of Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s art. One wrote: “Really useless. Why can’t the man keep his private collection of saccharine Victorian art private?” But more than 226,000 people – an average of 2,693 a day – paid to see his treasures. The doorstep-sized catalogue (£15 paperback, £35 hardback) had to be reprinted three times.” The show turns out to be one of the RA’s most popular exhibitions of the past decade.

The struggling Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York has plans to give itself a makeover. “Some in the design field say a rethinking is long overdue, but they remain skeptical about the museum’s ability to pull it off, given its recent history. ‘Under director Paul Thompson the museum has the same blurry identity it has always had. There’s still no strong thread holding it together’.”