Category: visual

Artist John Currin suddenly switched his gallery affiliation last week from his longtime New York dealer, Andrea Rosen, to Larry Gagosian. “Artists change galleries all the time, but Mr. Currin’s timing drew a great deal of attention. The show at the Whitney is the culmination of his 14-year association with Ms. Rosen, who gave him his first commerical gallery show, in 1992, and worked assiduously to foster and manage his success. Speculation about Mr. Currin’s move fueled conversation at art-world Christmas parties over the weekend, with expressions ranging from disgust to admiration for an astute business move.”

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is closing for renovations for five years. This will have a big impact abroad. “British visitors are crucial to the museum’s finances, which are more perilous since privatisation of the Dutch museum sector eight years ago. Britons and Americans each contribute 25% of its roughly million visitors a year, followed by the Japanese and French – with Dutch visitors trailing a long way down the list.”

Melbourne has been on a building boom, luring thousands of new residents downtown with a wave of new apartment construction. This is slowing growth of the suburbs. But there’s a downside. “We are building what will become ghettos of poor quality, cheap, badly built, high-maintenance houses in the sky. These towers will form an urban and social blight within 10 years that will scar the tissue of the city. They are badly built and unsuited for renovation. They will most likely be demolished when their investment use-by date is up.”

“After months of bitter disagreement, the master planner and lead architect for the World Trade Center site yesterday unveiled the design of an iconic new tower that will rise 1,776 feet above Ground Zero to become the world’s tallest building… The structure would be torqued in shape, giving it an asymmetrical look. And though its grand spire would pierce the sky, the building would house 2.6 million square feet of office space only up to the 60th floor… At the 66th floor, a public observation deck will be built. And at the 67th, the famed Windows on the World restaurant will return when the building is completed in early 2009.”

With all the public feuding between architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs, the public had good reason to fear that the eventual design of New York’s newest skyscraper would turn out to be a monument to ego and greed. Instead, says Herbert Muschamp, maturity seems to have prevailed, and New Yorkers ought to be thankful that it did. “The architects have come close to transcending what’s left of their battered selves. With some shrewd editing, the design could become one of the noblest skyscrapers ever realized in New York.”

The problem with the new Libeskind/Childs design, says Blair Kamin, is that it’s pretty good. In fact, it’s probably just good enough that no one will seriously object to its being built, thus depriving New Yorkers of a truly great addition to their skyline. “As the banality of the twin towers made clear when they were completed in the early 1970s, there is a critical difference between technical achievement and aesthetic quality.” Chief among Kamin’s complaints about the new design is that master architect Daniel Libeskind’s grand vision seems to have been relegated to the sidelines, and David Childs’ glittery clichès have taken over.

New Yorkers are fond of leading the world in one thing or another. So it’s no surprise that the new Freedom Tower is being pumped as ‘the world’s tallest building.’ But is it, really? “It will certainly be the world’s tallest cable-framed, open-air, windmill-filled, spire-studded superstructure, rising atop 70 stories of offices, restaurants, a broadcast center and an observation deck,” says David Dunlap, but uninhabitable spires such as the one that will stretch some 625 feet above the tower’s occupied space may not count towards the ‘world’s tallest’ designation. The final decision on such things is left to the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, which we swear we are not making up.

The Art Gallery of Ontario is expanding, and simultaneously undergoing a bit of an inner identity crisis, with the recent controversial closing of its Canadian wing, and the announcement that it will begin to integrate such decorative arts as pistols and fountain pens into its collection. “Through the history of museums… idiosyncratic tastes have driven great institutions forward — and hobbled smaller ones in perpetuity.” For a sense of what paths the AGO may wish to explore, and which ones it may need to avoid, Kate Taylor suggests a fresh look at the various melodramas surrounding Philadelphia’s embattled Barnes Collection.

Beijing’s Factory 798 is home to an amazing collective of contemporary artists who are remaking modern art in China. “This giant Bauhaus-style collection of workshops somehow manages to confirm the old cultural stereotypes about this nominally communist country, while simultaneously turning them upside down. The setting is a plot of living history.”

Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art is in the final planning stages for its new home on the South Boston Waterfront, but everyone involved had to pause this week, when it was announced that the family which owns the land on which the new ICA will sit intended to sell the plot, after deciding not to develop it. ICA officials are saying that the sale should not affect their plans, since any new owner would be required to abide by the terms of ICA’s lease with the current ownership. Still, a new developer could choose to build whatever it wished on the non-ICA portion of the land, and observers are wincing at the possibility of a grand new museum surrounded by parking lots.