Category: visual

In three weeks, designs for the tallest tower at the World Trade Center site must be finished. And there is constant negotiating going on. “Although many aspects of the proposed new tower are still in flux, several features are consistent to every recent draft rendering of the tower. Surviving from Daniel Libeskind’s original proposal is the asymmetrical shape of the tower, along with its narrow spire feature, both of which are meant to simulate the torchbearing arm of the Statue of Liberty seen from the harbor. Also surviving is the slanted roof that gives a spiraling sweep to the shape of the circle of the five skyscrapers, of descending height, called for in his master plan.”

A small Rembrandt etching was found in some junk due to be thrown out in the garbage. “The small image of two beggars was discovered among items at the Emmaus charity shop in Carlton, near Bedford.”

There were 5000 anonymous entries competing to design the memorial for 911 at the World Trade Center site. Many have been surprised that the five finalists are younger artists instead of older established names…

Some resistance to building a new Guggenheim is surfacing in Taiwan. “Those who object are mostly worried about a cultural invasion and the danger of an American cultural hegemony taking root.”

The British government is launching a campaign to try to prevent people from being taken in by scam investments. “The investment scam of the moment appears to be art. A few years ago it was ostriches, later followed by whisky, wine and champagne. Thousands of people have been targeted by companies promising big returns if they buy art prints which are then supposedly leased out to hang on the walls of large companies.”

A prominant Asian businessman has criticized Singapore’s public funding of what he called “elitist, intentionally avant-garde work which ‘may have no relevance at all’ outside of the West. He suggested that public funding of such ‘so-called art installations’ had become ‘disconnected from the community’ which they purport to engage with. Globalisation, he said, was a ‘double-edged sword’, tending to homogenise indigenous art movements while making them known to the world.”

A new generation of art sellers has emerged in New York. They “have been mounting shows in unusual spaces, featuring work that is fast, cheap, and exuberant—and produced more often by ‘collectives’ than by nineties-style art stars (not that any of these artists would pass up their own fifteen minutes). This fall, these players have become their own Establishment: Several of their artists were just tapped for the Whitney Biennial, and a number are members of the New Art Dealers Alliance, which declares that the ‘adversarial approach to exhibiting and selling art’ is dead.”

“Over the past decade repatriation departments have been set up in museums across America, Australia, Canada and New Zealand to return human remains to their places of origin. While research on human remains can reveal information about historic patterns of migration, lifestyle and disease – a substantial amount of energy, time and money has instead been committed to burying the evidence.”

As a rule, London does not do skyscrapers. Or it didn’t, until recently. But with a new wave of British culture is coming a new look to the London skyline, and one of the centerpieces is a building which is best described as a 40-story pickle. “The architect is Norman Foster, a man famous for his audaciousness. He designed London’s city hall, an eye-catching if utterly weird structure that looks like a bicycle helmet attacked by a madman wielding a large, dull ax.”

“Art auctioneers are only human or so it’s said, and they and their staff are as prone to making mistakes as the rest of us. But how did the international saleroom Christie’s manage to list a painting by Ray Crooke for its art auction tomorrow night that it sold in August to Australia’s biggest-spending dealer, Denis Savill?” The new catalog lists the painting with a different title than the one it had when Savill purchased it, but all sides agree that it is the same work. This isn’t the first time that Savill has had a problem with Christie’s: the auction house “previously ‘mislaid’ three paintings he had bought at various auctions, and… recovering them took nine months in one instance and two years in another.”