Category: visual

Manager’s of London’s National Gallery charge that the government is starving the museum of cash. “The difficulties faced in making big acquisitions had almost reached ‘crisis proportions’, and the decline in the annual grant left ‘nothing to spare’. Taking inflation into account, the gallery would need an extra £2.5m on top of the 2002-03 government grant of £20.4m to match the support offered, say, eight years ago.”

The US Supreme Court says it will hear a case “about Nazi-era stolen art to clarify when foreign governments can be sued in U.S. courts. ‘The diplomatic ramifications of a United States court holding that Austria, a nation friendly to the United States, must appear in a United States court to answer charges that it is actively advancing Nazi war-crimes in connection with a matter of extreme domestic importance to Austria, cannot be understated’.”

The way seems clear for the Barnes Collection to move to Philadelphia and have a shot at becoming self-sustaining. But still, some “critics worry that the groundwork is being laid for a new ‘MacBarnes’, a user-friendly museum/mall of gift shops and computer nooks designed to maximise the number of visitors. For now, the Barnes’s petition retains Albert C. Barnes’s ban on lending or selling works from the collection but critics warn that this might be reconsidered in the future if expansion plans collapse.”

There has been no small amount of grumbling about the fact that the big summer festivals in Edinburgh don’t include a visual arts component. Now a high-profile group is attempting to start one. “The summer event – which would be modelled on the lines of the Venice Biennale, Europe’s leading visual arts festival, is likely to involve exhibitions, discussions and book-signings by leading figures in the art world, as well as giving contemporary Scottish artists a showcase opportunity.”

When five of 60 artists participating in a group studio show in a California county building submitted pictures of nudes, they were told they couldn’t display them. The artists were told it was a county policy for “no nudity:” “The artists were told to take the nudes down because it was our feeling since the art is being displayed in a public place where the public is not coming to the building to see art but rather to do business, that there’s a more appropriate place for the pieces. It’s a public building, they’re asking our permission to put their art there, and we have a say.”

Dealer Charles Saatchi says the white box gallery space is dead. “Many in the art world, artists included, feel contemporary art can only be seen properly in a perfect white space. If art can’t look good outside the antiseptic gallery spaces dictated by museum fashion of the last 25 years, then it condemns itself to a worryingly limited lifespan. What’s more, that once cutting-edge gallery style is beginning to look like a cliche trendy bar or loft conversion. It’s time for a rethink.”

Early reviews of Chicago’s new Soldier Field have been critical. But Herbert Muschamp suspects the verdict will change: “I suspect that it won’t be long before the city embraces the new field. The design’s urban and architectural merits are considerable. Its conceptual qualities are better still. If you set out to write something bad about the design, you ultimately end up with a critique of the society that produced it. But the design is much more than a symptom of our time. It is a creative response to it. Soldier Field is a daring study of urban America in extremis, precariously poised for a future beyond its widely unlamented demise.”

Manhattan’s New Museum has taken in the Rhizome.org digital artist internet site. The museum world still doesn’t really know what it’s relationship with digital art is, so this is an interesting partnership. “When digital artists began to create online artworks in the mid-1990’s, much of the art form’s energy was derived from the notion that the works did not need museums or galleries to reach an audience. Spawned by that sensibility in 1996, Rhizome quickly became one of the most popular Internet sites devoted to the digital arts. It is an online-only meeting place where members can announce new artworks, request technical assistance or argue over obscure aesthetic issues.”

Artist Olafur Eliasson has “constructed a reversed waterfall in which the water shoots up rather than down; a massive disc which loomed low over the city of Malmo in Sweden, lit at night by yellow light so that it resembled a night-time sun; and a long, snaking slick of green dye in the waterways of Stockholm.” Now he’s taken on creating something for the giant turbine room at Tate Modern, which he hopes to tunr into a “microclimate.”

A change in the American tax law would allow artists to get tax deductions for the full value of artwork they donate to museums. “Now, for example, if a collector gives his Jasper Johns paintings to a museum, he can deduct their full market value. But if Jasper Johns gives the paintings he made himself, he can deduct only the cost of the materials used to make them. Ironically, when their creators die, these same items suddenly gain conventional market value for estate-tax purposes. Definitely out of whack!”