Category: visual

Matthew Collings, like all critics, “has made a career out of parasitism. Without Damien’s shark and Tracey’s bed, we wouldn’t know his name.” He was the critic who talked us through all the wierdnesses of BritArt and the YBAs. But now he’s in a different mood: “We don’t live in a great time for art; we live in a time when art is very successful as a leisure activity. Art is very amusing, but within that culture there’s still a hierarchy of better and worse. I’m interested in that hierarchy but I recognise that modern art and pre-modern art were very important, and postmodern art is rubbish, really.”

David Dillon writes that Disney Hall “confirms Mr. Gehry’s standing as the boldest and most inventive architect of his generation. Looking at the hall’s billowing facade – a sail, a kite, a lotus blossom, the visual analogies are endless – it’s easy to forget that Mr. Gehry started out designing shopping malls and spec office buildings for James Rouse and other developers. And when he won the competition for Disney Hall, he was known primarily as the kooky guy who put chain-link fence on his house and asphalt on his kitchen floor – not the sort of architect who should be trusted with a major civic building, thought the culturati. The breakthrough came with CATIA, a computer program used to design the French Mirage fighter.”

Museum stores are increasingly an important part of any museum’s bottom line. “A survey of more than 800 institutions published in May by the American Association of Museums in Washington showed that the median gross income of museum stores contributed more to total operating budgets (6.8 percent) than admissions (6.2 percent) and membership fees (5.8 percent).”

Disputes between architects Daniel Libeskind and David Childs over the tower above the World Trade Center site are the latest chapter in a long history of architectural disputes. “The absence of knife play over the Freedom Tower does not guarantee that the intended partnership will run smoothly. A meeting between the architects last Monday was described as positive by both sides. History, however, suggests that the turmoil will continue. There is a long tradition, in New York, of architectural bargaining and bickering that has produced gems like Rockefeller Center, duds (let’s be honest now) like the World Trade Center and compromises like Lincoln Center and the United Nations. Not only is the record a rancorous one, but Mr. Libeskind and Mr. Childs are navigating challenges unlike any faced by their predecessors.”

American Architect Louis Kahn was a brilliant architect and a flawed man. Herbert Muschamp pronounces that a documentary of his life is a “wonder of a movie” That “should put a stop to the notion that architecture is a less creative form of practice than music, painting, literature or dance. I have never seen or read a more penetrating account of the inner life of an architect — or of architecture itself — than that presented in this movie.”

Even though he was one of the 20th Century’s premiere architects, Louis Kahn was a remote presence. “Who was Kahn? A genius? A cad? A man whose accomplishments transcended such judgments? In the end, not even Kahn himself seemed to know. He was found dead in New York’s Penn Station in 1974, his body unclaimed for three days because he’d crossed out his address in his passport. Why?”

A new documentary about the life of architect Louis Kahn is one of the best movies of the year, writes Carrie Rickey. “The most penetrating insights into Kahn come not from the mandarins of modern architecture, nor the architect’s fiercely intelligent mistresses Anne Tyng and Harriet Pattison (Nathaniel’s mother), nor his children, but from the janitors in Dhaka who pray in the mosque of the capital building that a Jew built for Muslims. For these men who mistakenly call the architect Louis Farrakhan, the building is a vessel of the spirit.”

“There is something about walking into a Louis Kahn building that makes analysis seem superfluous, if not silly. The best ones just succeed—not simply at keeping out the rain or the cold but at suggesting something important about our relationship with the built world. It may sound too basic, or too sappy, to say that the reason for Kahn’s continuing appeal is that he sought an architecture that was more concerned with the timeless than the fashionable. But it’s also the truth.”

This week’s Phillips auction of art made since 1945 set record prices for several artists. The buyers were younger than the average blue-chip auction crowd, and “the growing appetite for these newer works was more apparent than ever. There are new young collectors drawn to contemporary art. These are really the blue-chip artists of tomorrow.”

Herbert Muschamp says the New Museum of Contemporary Art’s planned building for the Bowery, is a “seven-story bento box for art.” “Like every substantial building that has gone up in Manhattan in the past decade, Saana’s design demonstrates the fecundity that occurs when the idea of context is distinguished from mere adjacency. Add to, rather than fit in with: this is the crux of the distinction. When a building is dedicated to contemporaneity, as the New Museum will be, the design should add to the present.”