Category: visual

The National Archives reopens in Washington DC. “The Declaration and the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the documents the Archives calls the Charters of Freedom, are back on display in the Rotunda of the Archives building after being away from public view 2 1/2 years. The building has been extensively renovated to make the documents more accessible to visitors, especially the handicapped, and the Charters have been re-encased after minute and painstaking conservation treatment. The entire project is estimated to have cost as much as $136 million.”

ArtReview Magazine’s new “Power 100” list of the most influential collectors of art contains a few surprises this year. Charles Saatchi will be knocked from first place to sixth. But perhaps just as surprising is the man who ranks No. 100: the dentist who fixed the teeth of the Young British Artist set. Artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin gave their dentist work in trade for his tooth care. “Emin has regularly sung his praises, telling interviewers: ‘My dentist is the best in Britain!’ She said last night: ‘He’s a really good and kind dentist who took my teeth on when no one else would go near them with a barge pole’.”

“This week, art’s most respected competition, the Turner Prize, invites its biggest controversy with a display of a graphic and sexually explicit sculpture by two of Britain’s foremost artists.”

German architects have little to do. “There is certainly no future in the inner cities, where all museums, government buildings, company headquarters and shopping streets have already been completed. The crisis in German architecture is not just an economic problem, but also an issue of ideology.”

The Art Gallery of Ontario has a Degas show that is deeply suspect. Rather than explain some of the complications to the public, the AGO says nothing. “Following the Royal Ontario Museum’s 2001 display of Auguste Rodin plaster casts that were repudiated by the Musée Rodin in Paris, the show reveals a depressing willingness from leading Canadian museums to abandon their educational role and fudge ethical standards to move bodies through the turnstile.”

“More than 100 wealthy buyers of art, jewelry and antiques have been forced to make good on unpaid sales taxes as part of a continuing investigation of New York’s art world that was sparked by last year’s arrest of Tyco International Ltd.’s former chief executive, L. Dennis Kozlowski.”

An artificial fog created as part of an installation at Tate Modern has sparked concern. “A chemical haze created for Olafur Eliasson’s spectacular apocalyptic installation, the Weather Project – which has provoked near-religious awe in the crowds flocking to see it in the museum’s Turbine Hall – is slowly creeping into the galleries. Attendants, who have to spend from eight to 12 hours in the fug, claim they are becoming disorientated.”

“Christie’s covered up its discovery that an Old Master painting it had hoped to auction had been looted by the Nazis, failing to alert art market authorities or the heirs of the original owners of the picture, a Guardian investigation has established.”

Sir Aurel Stein sent back 40,000 artifacts back to the British Museum from China. His feats were described by one of his contemporaries as the most daring and adventurous raid upon the ancient world that any archaeologist has attempted. While his life’s work is celebrated in the western world, he is remembered in a very different way by countries whose heritage he ‘looted’. The heritage taken is China’s parallel to the Greek claim on the Elgin Marbles – priceless friezes taken from the temple of the Parthenon in the 19th Century: both are unique cultural relics taken away by Europeans.”

“Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, is getting a valuable painting by Rembrandt that might otherwise have come to Montreal if the donor, Alfred Bader, had not been refused admission to McGill University in 1941 because he is a Jew. The painting, estimated to be worth millions of dollars, is the latest bequest to Queen’s from Milwaukee philanthropists Bader and his second wife, Isabel… [The] gift, titled Head of an Old Man in a Cap, was painted about 1630. It is one of only four paintings in Canada by Rembrandt van Rijn.”