Category: visual

Cuba is after the tourist trade. “Tourists have come: two million visitors are expected in Havana this year. However, the special city they have come to see is in danger of vanishing – not simply because of age, humidity, termites and general lack of maintenance. The word in Havana is that when the president, Fidel Castro, dies and the US finally lifts its longstanding economic embargo, Havana will be transformed, and not necessarily for the better.”

New York has lost its reputation as a place that great architecture can be built. “Between about 1890 and 1960, New York was an architectural powerhouse, a laboratory for architects who couldn’t dream of achieving anything on that kind of scale anywhere else. From early Gothic skyscrapers like the Woolworth Building (1913) through the Art Deco of the Chrysler and Empire State Buildings (1930 and 1931) up to the Seagram Building (1958) and the smooth corporate Modernism of Fifth Avenue, architects who wanted to build big looked to New York. But… it is extraordinary that in the world’s greatest and richest city, almost nothing (excepting a few good retail interiors) of international significance or interest has been built in New York since the appearance of unfortunate postmodern skyscrapers at the end of 1970s.”

A new website designed to track down art looted by the Nazis goes online. “So far 66 museums have given details of their collection to the site, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and Chicago’s Institute of Art. The Nazis were thought to have looted more than 1.5 million pieces of art. More than 100,000 items of museum quality are still missing, and some of them are said to have made their way to the US.”

Big museum shows seem to be in short supply this season. “At this time last year, the museum world looked as though it was doing some retrenching. Few blockbusters were on the roster; fewer shows of any kind had been announced than was the norm throughout the 1990s. If last year looked like a retreat, this year may be a rout. There’s hardly a single true blockbuster built around a famous name.”

A PBS series explores art through its artists. “More than explaining any discrete work of art, `Art 21′ leaves you with a sense of how artists think about what they do, as well as why they feel compelled to do it, and demystifies a group the public at large sometimes views as eccentric, unstable or, worse, charlatans.”

“Nowadays, ‘modernism’ is everywhere. Gargantuan ‘modernist’ lofts jut up from every block of the SoMa district. Boutiques with monosyllabic names and monochrome wall-paint are everywhere selling “modernist” trinkets. An ever-growing slew of home catalogs offer requisite modernist furnishings, the photo spreads illustrating (proudly!) how 40 rooms in 20 different houses can look totally indistinguishable from one another. There’s even a Web site – Etekt.com – that offers architectural plans to create your very own tract home based on designs by your favorite modernist designer. Oh yes, and on sale now at Levitz: the new “modernist” collection. Really. What’s so frustrating is that this surge of minimalist modernism – what I will now refer to as modermalism – is not ‘modern’ at all.”

“The debate that has unfolded over the rebuilding of the World Trade Center for the last year has brought New Yorkers as close as they have ever come to the ancient Florentine conviction that the most profound questions of urban design demand a public voice. Now, as the second anniversary of 9/11 approaches, that democratic moment seems to have passed.”

A developer proposes to build a new 20-story apartment building about 50 metres from the front entrance of the Tate Modern. It’s “a notion described by the Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, as ‘the equivalent of building a tower block in the forecourt of the British Museum’.”

In Boston an architect builds one of the most-loved new buildings, then turns around and follows it with one of the most-hated. Robert Campbell observes: “In 30 years of writing about architecture, I’ve never heard so many expressions of outrage over a new building. The anguish arrives from all angles: from the general public, and from the community of architects.”

The Museum of Modern Art gets some new curators…