Category: visual

The Palace of Versailles is to be given a €400 million restoration that will take 20 years. “The Sun King’s 700-room palace and 800-hectare (2,000-acre) garden are to be given a long-overdue facelift aimed at restoring their lost sparkle – recapturing their architectural purity and rendering them safe for the 10 million people who visit each year. This is the first big restoration programme for Versailles since the early 1800s, and the biggest such undertaking in France since the remodelling of the Louvre in the late 1900s.”

A scuplture commemorating composer Benjamin Britten in his beloved town of Aldeburgh has provoked protests, with many townsfolk calling it an eyesore. “The eyesore is a glorious thing, four tonnes of steel cut and shaped into giant scallop shells, which will rear up from the beach. From the shore the cut-out letters against the sky will read as a line from Peter Grimes: ‘I hear those voices that will not be drowned.’ The artist is despondent over the reception his work is getting: “It never crossed my mind that it would be in any way controversial. I thought that people might come up and say thank you – more fool me. My own newsagent just said to me, ‘Hello, how’s the eyesore coming along?'”

Jake Chapman, a Turner Prize finalist, and “half of the pair dubbed ‘the Brothers Grim’, has unleashed an excoriating attack on the Tate Modern and Saatchi galleries, accusing them of threatening the future of art by bowing to the lowest common denominator. He called the Tate a ‘monument to absolute cultural saturation’ and said he would rather take a ride at Alton Towers than look at some of its contents. Charles Saatchi’s gallery was ‘simply an expression of one man’s ownership’.”

What’s with all the “controversy about the Chapmans’ Turner entry this year? “Nobody I know who has actually seen the Chapman brothers’ Death, as the sculpture is called, thought it anything other than oafish. To my mind, it is by far the duffest work they have ever produced. The sense is of a stand-up comic who has lost his sense of timing and is reduced to begging for a laugh.” Meanwhile, the rest of the show is pretty good…

The Turner Prize is the art prize people love to hate. “In its early days the award was criticised for its emphasis on established names, but in 1991 it was relaunched with a hip new sponsor, twice the prize money and an upper age limit. It was thus perfectly positioned to pick up on the whole Britart phenomenon.” Now it fuels controversy after manufactured controversy. Here’s the Guardian’s look back at 20 years of the Turner…

Venice is under threat of a major flood – not if, but when. So it’s time to get on with building gates to help control water. The controversial flood control plan has been in the works for decades. “The barriers are to be completed by 2012 at a cost of 2.5 billion euros. A prototype section of the barriers was successfully tested as long ago as the 1980s, but their execution has been delayed by objections from the Green Party, which believes, among other things, that they would cause the lagoon to become dangerously polluted if closed frequently.”

The Hudson Valley art center, which opened last summer, has already exceeded its visitor projections. “Our original expectation was 60,000 visitors for the opening year; then we upped the number to 100,000. We’ve already hit our target, and it’s been open less than six months.”

Connecticut’s Aldrich Muwseum is selling off its collection. “Aldrich officials say the sale is not about money because they expect to clear less than $50,000 after expenses. That is far less than the $200,000 for which the collection is insured and hardly material for an institution with a $1.5 million annual operating budget and a $7.5 million renovation and expansion under way. The usual taboos about selling art from a museum were hard to square with the mission of an institution devoted to art of the moment.”

Tate Modern’s new large installation has visitors gawking. “Nothing prepares you for the almost psychotropic transformation of human social behaviour that is currently taking place where the turbines of Bankside power station once roared. Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project only opened a couple of weeks ago, but it is already a legend. Visitors seem to think they are at some storied 60s festival – barriers are melting, frosty politeness traded at the door for cockeyed mysticism and love, love, love. Under a vast blazing sun, in clouds of dry ice, revellers lie, looking up at what must surely be the biggest mirrored ceiling in the world, and conclude that, hey, maybe we really are all made of stars. The scale is so excessive, it is hard to experience Eliasson’s artwork as art – it is more like nature itself, and we, down below, make the art.”