Category: visual

Proposals for Trafalgar’s empty plinth are startlingly different from one another. “By 7.54am yesterday somebody had posted a plea on the Fourth Plinth website seeking the public’s reaction: ‘Put something fun there’.”

Two Rembrandt etchings were stolen from a home in Melbourne last week. “Police said the etchings were taken along with their certificates of authenticity during a break-in at the family home. One of the etchings depicts a self portrait of the artist and the other a portrait of Rembrandt’s mother.”

John Anderson wonders if the Pew Charitable Trust’s recent change in legal foundation status is a positive thing for the Barnes Collection. “If indeed under its new identity the Pew can control the Barnes’s purse strings, it will put a whole new complexion on the proposed plan should it be approved by the court. It makes it look less like the ‘rescue’ it has been portrayed as and more like the “takeover” critics (such as myself) have called it. For in controlling the money, the Pew would have de facto control over the Barnes Foundation itself, with a powerful role in determining the future character and direction of the Barnes.”

For more than a century art historians have wondered what event inspired Edvard Munch’s most famous painting “The Scream.” Now some astonomers in Texas have come up with a theory based on a major natural event…

Competing groups from France and the US are proposing to tour Afghanistan’s greatest treasure – the Bactrian gold. “The finds from Tillya Tepe, in northern Afghanistan, date from a 2,000-year-old tomb which was discovered in 1978, but they have never been on display for security reasons. The gold alone numbers 20,000 items. Afghanistan still has nowhere with sufficient security to exhibit the material, since the bombed and looted Kabul Museum on the outskirts of town is an extremely damaged building. A touring exhibition would raise money, at least part of which would go to rebuild the museum or establish a new purpose-built museum in the city centre.”

Former Talking Heads musician David Byrne has turned to PowerPoint as his latest artistic medium. “His art presentations make babble of business-speak, and question whether the form of what we communicate can affect its truth: Rebellious flow charts stream backward, screens overflow with clip art gone wild, deliverables and leave-behinds assume surreal new roles, and renegade bullet points assault the viewer in a rapid-fire barrage.”

Australia’s various levels of government have united to pump an additional $39 million in funding to the visual arts. The money is the direct result of a Federal Government-initiated inquiry. In a joint announcement the governments said they would allocate the funds to support infrastructure, including giving more money to 40 arts and crafts organisations, expand the market through more art fairs and touring, give more grants to individual artists and provide more support for indigenous art.”

A hearing to determine the fate of the Barnes Collection began Monday. The Barnes wants to break its founder’s trust and move to downtown Philadelphia. Museum officials testified the Foundation will go bankrupt if it is not allowed to move.

“The tall building is the symbol of all that we hope for—height, reach, power, and a revolving restaurant with a long wine list—and all that we cower beneath. It is a symbol of oomph and of waste, the lighthouse of commerce and the outhouse of capitalism, the tallest candle on the biggest cake, and the cash-economy prison made up of countless anonymous cells. When the Empire State Building was being built, as Neal Bascomb reveals in his new book, the motive for its height was insistently said to be commercial—it was more economical, and the spire would be a place for wandering zeppelins to find a mooring—even though everyone knew that the real motive was just to be . . . taller.