Category: visual

Architect Will Alsop says that Tate Modern has been hugely overhyped, and that it should never have been located in a former power station. “I don’t think [Tate Modern] is a great building. It casts a very large shadow over the river edge. They should have pulled the existing building down. When I go around I feel I’m being guided in the same way I might be guided round a shopping centre.”

Choosing Grayson Perry to win this year’s Turner Prize was evidently no slam dunk as far as the judges were concerned. “The judges’ verdict was anything but a foregone conclusion: it took hours longer than usual to reach a decision, and they went out of their way to praise ‘the outstanding presentations produced by all four artists’. But, in the end, Perry’s use of the traditions of ceramics and drawing, and his “uncompromising engagement with personal and social concerns” put him out front.”

Why did Grayson Perry win this year’s Turner Prize, asks Adrian Searle. “Grayson Perry is, at least in terms of his self-constructed public image and his candid interviews, an interesting, complicated character. But he makes middling, minor art. What counts most, perhaps, is Perry’s invented alter ego, Claire, who is exactly the kind of creation the media loves. Yet I have always wondered what the pots, the drawing, Perry and Claire have to do with one another – apart from all being Perry’s invention, all aspects of Perry.”

“Born in Chelmsford, Essex, in 1960, his parents split up when he was five and his stepfather, the milkman, was a bully…”

Michael Kimmelman believes that all the candidates for the WTC memorial ought to be thrown out. “This is in part a memorial to extreme bravery in the face of overwhelming force. Here’s a chance to be brave. We know you still haven’t presented your winning choice, which will no doubt be modified from the plans we now see. But don’t bother. Nothing short of extreme, last-ditch action has a chance of succeeding, because the process has been crucially flawed from the start. Instead of beginning with a firm idea about the meaning of the memorial, we started with a timetable. Instead of guaranteeing that the best artists and architects participated in the process, we pandered to the crowd.”

The Vietnam Memorial was a revolution in thinking about memorials. “Twenty-one years later, the wall of names has become a visual cliche and memorial designers are straining to reach the profound synthesis of form and meaning that the Vietnam memorial so eloquently achieved. The finalists in the World Trade Center memorial competition have many of the superficial attributes of the Vietnam Memorial — the stark materials, the abstract vocabulary, the striving for elemental simplicity. Yet at this point, they are simply Maya Lin wannabes, not the real thing.”

Pottery artist Grayson Perry has won this year’s Turner Prize. “Perry accepted the award in a dress, as his female alter-ego Claire, thanked his wife and said he was ‘stunned’. A popular choice among the public, he beat off competition from the favourites, the Chapman brothers.”

A courtyard at Australia’s National Museum in Canberra has come under attack. “The public is overwhelmingly hostile towards the courtyard. They don’t like it and something has to be done,” says the chairman of a council set up to review the work. “Conservatives, led by former Howard speechwriter and council member Christopher Pearson have decried the museum’s futuristic design and complex architectural symbols since it opened in March 2001.”

More and more museums are opening stores – often in malls and shopping centers far away from their homes. “Totaling more than 1,800 nationwide, such stores generally offer a range of products tied to their museums’ missions. You typically don’t need to pay admission to shop, and purchases help provide vital financial support, up to as much as a third of some museums’ operating budgets.”

Western museums have traditionally resisted requests to return cultural heritage to their countries of origin. “Yet museums and claimants may be inching toward some common ground. American museum directors said recently that they are revising guidelines for addressing repatriation claims. And some combatants are working toward creative solutions. Even the Elgin sculptures could make a visit home for the Olympics. Greece and the British Museum reportedly are discussing a possible loan. And while they defend the idea of a ‘universal museum’ with the common heritage of humankind on display under one roof, museum directors are looking for new missions.”