Category: visual

Architect David Childs is having a major impact on the skyline of New York. “At Skidmore Owings & Merrill, you don’t know what my next building will look like. You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there’s a style. I’m more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different.” Buildings as “egoistic big statements,” as Mr. Childs put it, do not interest him. Making the fabric of the city is what excites him most: how streets thread their way through avenues and parks, how they open vistas to rivers or create a neighborhood.”

The World Trade Center Restoration Movement is a group of people who want to retore the World Trade Center to pre-9/11. “In close solidarity with one another, and in opposition to the city’s political establishment, business leaders, academics and civic groups, and just about everyone else whose opinion matters, the W.T.C.R.M. demands that the World Trade Center towers be rebuilt. Not replaced by something new and supposedly better. Rebuilt, hewing as closely as possible to the design of the buildings that were lost on Sept. 11.”

Should there be a “Museum of Freedom” built at the site of the World Trade Center? The idea has been proposed. But Herbert Muschamp writes that trying to wedge the idea of “freedom” into a building is highly problematic…

The Oslo city council has approved $6.6. million to preserve the works of Edvard Munch. “Very few of Munch’s paintings are in top condition. Most of them are now peeling so much that we have no chance of doing our job with so few staff. The classic Skrik was painted on cardboard and is so even more vulnerable to damage. Munch never applied any protective layering to his paintings. He wanted to keep the matt finish, so he never varnished his paintings.”

What’s needed for the World Trade Center space, argues Justin Davidson, is something that can serve many functions. A new exhibition gives “a sense of how many simultaneous functions a public space can serve. Italian urbanists long ago understood the beauty of an open square – or ellipse, lopsided trapezoid, or whatever shape streets and houses would permit – on which civic, religious and commercial institutions front and which different generations adapt to their own purposes. These are hybrid areas, where the sacred rubs up against the profane.”

Who stole the Leonardo painting in Scotland? “His fee, measured in millions, will in all likelihood fund an international drugs deal. Serious Crime Squad detectives, drafted into Dumfries-shire in the wake of yesterday’s theft, believe the Madonna was stolen to order. The theft had all the hallmarks. The thieves bypassed other masterpieces in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Drumlanrig Castle to steal the smaller but infinitely more valuable Da Vinci.”

A Leonardo painting has been stolen in southern Scotland. “The work, known as Madonna with the Yarnwinder, was owned by the Duke of Buccleuch and on display at Drumlanrig Castle, in southern Scotland. Police said they were looking for four men seen driving near the castle in a white Volkswagen Golf Gti today.”

Scottish police have found the getaway car used by the brazen art thieves who swiped a Leonardo yesterday, but are still looking for the thieves themselves. The car was found abandoned in the woods near Drumlanrig Castle, and authorities are searching for a second car. The stolen painting is, of course, impossible to sell, and it has been added to Interpol’s database of major artworks which are missing or stolen.

“The history of art holds many examples of performers who have ignited the imagination of artists. Compelled to bask in their often strange and lurid glow, artists draw closer, like moths to the flame… If a group of emerging Toronto artists is to be believed, Michael Jackson serves as just such a lightning rod today.” Yup, it’s that Michael Jackson, and much of the art inspired by His Strangeness is every bit the sarcastic dreck you’d expect. Still, “some of the work is surprisingly sincere.”

The theft of a Leonardo painting this week adds to a list of famous art heists in history. Here’s a list of some of the most notorius… “If you’re going to allow public access, particularly to a location of this sort, which is not in the centre of a major city, it is difficult to guard against this type of attack.”