Category: visual

New York’s Museum of Modern Art, better known the world over as MoMA, is changing its logo. Well, sort of. It actually looks about the same as it did before, with big block letters spelling out MoMA on a white background. In fact, even the typeface is the same. So what’s the difference? Well, you see, the old logo was awful and soulless. The new one is fresh and charming, but with a nod to tradition. Really, it is. Just ask them.

“When art deco arrived in Toronto in the late ’20s, it was more than an aesthetic or just a style; it was a declaration of faith — faith in the future and the power of technology. From the vantage point of today, such optimism seems naïve, even touching. The notion that art and industry can be combined, brought together in the service of mass-produced beauty, has been reduced to the lowest common denominator of mass marketing. Now, thanks to the Royal Ontario Museum and its London partner, the Victoria and Albert Museum, art deco is about to make a comeback, a rather splendid one at that… But the one form that the show can’t fully cover, architecture, can still be enjoyed in buildings around the city.”

Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center is closing in February for a year. “Plans call for the Walker to reopen in spring 2005, when a $90 million addition on its south side will be finished. The addition includes new galleries, a small theater, new dining facilities and other public spaces.”

“Dorothy Miller, who died in July at 99, was one of the first curators hired by the Museum of Modern Art in 1934. Over the years she championed painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella and Jasper Johns. The contents of her Greenwich Village apartment are to be sold in a series of auctions at Christie’s beginning Nov. 11 and are expected to bring $9 million to $12.6 million. They chronicle the 35-year career of a woman who helped shape modern art.”

There have been significant changes in architect Daniel Libeskind’s plan for rebuilding the World Trade Center site, which includes the world’s tallest structure. The new plan now calls for slimmer office buildings and the shifting of office and other development. AJ blogger Jan Herman reviews changes…

There’s an Art Deco revival going on. But wait, there’s always an Art Deco revival going on. “It’s easy to explain why the stuff is always popular: It’s gorgeous. The furniture is made of expensive natural materials — glossy wood, ivory, marble — and combines light and dark in a way that became unpopular in the all-white futuristic 1960s. It’s nice to touch, unlike the practical plastic and aluminum of contemporary neo-modernist design. Art Deco satisfies the hipster’s urge for modern shapes and lines -the sleek, the geometric, the angular – and yet is much more luxurious and ornate than the puritanical Bauhaus-inspired mid-century modernism that followed it.”

The US House of Representatives has voted to substantially increase the amount of insurance available to US museums to insure artwork borrowed from abroad. “The indemnity program, administered by the National Endowment for the Arts on behalf of the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities, was created in 1975 to minimize costs American museums pay to insure international exhibitions. Unlike standard commercial insurance, government indemnity covers the effects of terrorism both in transit and on site. The program has been flooded with requests from museums trying to organize ambitious international shows at a time when insurance costs have risen as much as 500 percent.”

One of the most precious pieces of art stolen from Iraq’s National Museum – a 5000-year-old sculpture – has been recovered. “The 20-centimetre high marble sculpture, dating from 3000 BC, depicts the head of a woman. It was fashioned in the southern city of Warka during the Sumerian period, and was among the five most precious pieces still missing since the museum was sacked after the April 9 fall of Saddam Hussein.”

Matthew Bogdanos is a marine helping to recover art stolen from Iraq’s National Museum: “To date over 1,700 items have been returned pursuant to the amnesty program, [but] there have been problems here, as well–specifically, the perception among the Iraqi people of the museum staff’s identification and association with the former regime and the Baath Party. Time and time again when individuals would turn property over, they would make it clear that they were turning the property over to the U.S. forces for safekeeping until a lawful Iraqi government could be elected. The raids and seizures have resulted in the recovery of over 900 artifacts.”

When the underground feminist art movement known as the Guerrilla Girls began its in-your-face campaign to broaden the recognition granted to female artists in traditional institutions, its members were considered revolutionaries. Now, a quarter-century later, the group has mostly disbanded, though a few members still keep up the fight. In retrospect, the question of what was accomplished by the Guerrilla Girls, and whether their message has had any lasting effect on the American cultural scene is a matter open to debate, and the remaining members of the group seem to have taken their movement away from a strict focus on art, and towards more general issues of feminism and society.