Category: visual

“During her lifetime, photographer Diane Arbus was lionized, but she was also lambasted for being exploitative. Her suicide in 1971 seemed to corroborate the caricature of her as a freaky ghoul.” In the first retrospective of her work since 1972 a “new portrait is emerging of one of the most powerful American artists of the 20th century, in the style that she favored. Uncropped.”

“Think of the enigmatic stillness that permeates the works of Vermeer, Gerrit Dou and Pieter de Hooch. You won’t find much of that amid the hubbub of Amsterdam. Yet along the Hague’s slightly dour purple brick pavements, and particularly in the marvellous Mauritshuis, you absorb it from the very ether.”

Dallas’s skyline gets a burst of color this week with the opening of the new Latino Cultural Center, and architect Ricardo Legorreta is already being credited with designing the most exciting piece of skyscraper architecture ever to hit the Metroplex. “Already there is evidence of color creep. The window frames of one adjacent apartment building have gone from hunter green to electric blue; another has been meticulously outlined in enchilada red. The blue tower and the terra cotta wedge of the performance hall are already landmarks, and the doors aren’t even open.”

“The new Latino Cultural Center manages to evoke ancient traditions and cultures without becoming a theme park. That’s quite a trick in this scenographic era and one that only a sophisticated architect could pull off.”

The Art Institute of Chicago and its many supporters were taken quite by surprise last week when director James N. Wood announced his impending retirement from the post he has held since 1980. Wood is as much a Chicago institution as the institute itself, writes Alan Artner, and the AIC’s board has a difficult task ahead in finding a replacement who can take the organization in new and exciting directions, without upsetting the balance of power which Wood maintained over the years.

When architect Frank Gehry was hired to design and build MIT’s new Stata Center For Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, the price tag was set at $100 million, gifts were rolling in, and the university was downright gleeful at having secured the services of arguably the hottest architect of the era. But “MIT brass now peg the budget at $300 million, although a June press release from a Stata Center supplier put the cost at $430 million. The completion date is spring 2004. And what once appeared futuristic now looks like a jumbly rehash of existing Gehry piles.”

Sculpture, it seems, is popular again, at least in Australia, and a new wave of artists working in three dimensions is garnering much attention from serious collectors. “The new breed of sculptors are decidedly challenging. Rendered death heads, dystopian buildings, a jury of chimpanzees and the Twelve Apostles constructed of chicken bones are among the pleasures to be encountered. And corporate and private money is getting behind it all.”

The Barnes Collection, an internationally renowned art collection which resides in a suburban community outside of Philadelphia, is one step closer to moving into the city itself. The Barnes move has long been a desire of local politicians and arts leaders, but internal and external politics have conistently intervened. Now, a deal has been struck between the Barnes and Lincoln University, a local state school which has historically held the right to appoint board members for the Barnes, under which Lincoln will drop its objections to the move. The deal must now be approved by a county judge.

Herzog and de Meuron’s new Laban dance center is the favorite to win this year’s Stirling Prize – British architecture’s top award. “The multicoloured building, as exotic as a hummingbird in the post-industrial wasteland of Deptford Creek, south-east London, was immediately made 2-1 favourite by William Hill bookmakers to take the £20,000 prize.”

Earlier this summer critic Philip Hensher charged in print that artist Tracey Emin was harrassing him.”The controversy began after Hensher claimed in the Independent that Emin was too stupid to be a good conceptual artist. Emin then complained in an Observer interview that she was being ‘completely slagged off by people whose mortgage I’m paying’ and made particular reference to a writer for the Independent.” Now Hensher has conceded that Emin had “not been sending china Peter Rabbit figurines” to him as he claimed. Huh?