Category: visual

The oldest continually-inhabited house in Britain has been identified. It was completed between 1148 and 1150 and is in Somerset. The news “stunned the owners of the house, James and Anna Wynn, who sold a small terrace house and left London five years ago to find somewhere with more room for their growing family and a bit of history.”

Finalists have been chosen for the first Schweppes portrait prize, an international competition with £15,000 awarded to the winner. “The prize is the successor to the John Kobal photographic portrait award, which until it ended last year was recognised as one of the most distinguished photography competitions. The new prize attracted more than 3,000 images from 1,212 professional and amateur photographers of which 60 have been selected for the exhibition’s opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London in November.”

When a painting by Nikolai Astrup goes up for auction later this fall, it will be the first time in almost a decade that a work by the Norwegian master will have been made available for public sale. “What is more remarkable about this work, which can fetch around [US$200,000], is that it was acquired for a three-cent lottery ticket in 1926, newspaper Bergensavisen reports.”

“The Library of Congress has acquired veteran cartoonist Art Wood’s enormous collection of 36,000 works by 2,800 artists, the largest private collection in the world.” Wood is arguably the most passionate collector and admirer of cartoon art in the world, and he has a long history at the Library, having first taken a job there at the age of 16. A successful cartoonist in his own right, Wood has always been fascinated with the medium, once writing that a good cartoon “scratches across the surface of life, whether the raw slums of the teeming city or the palatial mansion of the millionaire. It tells perhaps better than any medium what people are really like.”

Museums have been monuments to the past. But they’re evolving. “We have once again begun to see museums as our forebears did: as palaces of edification and delight, buildings that enhance the cultural life of cities and the intellectual lives of their inhabitants. Technology is playing a huge part in this revitalisation. Audio guides, animatronics, oral reconstructions, video, computer graphics, interactive displays, computers that recreate the sights, sounds and even smells of days gone by, all feature increasingly heavily in the museums of today.”

“For many years the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a part of the Smithsonian museum empire, has been identity-free. The Hirshhorn has never equaled the National Gallery of Art’s prestige and has never become as beloved as the Phillips. It’s long been a humdrum museum bunkered in an abominable Gordon Bunshaft building, with a so-so collection and a so-so exhibition schedule. Still, the Hirshhorn has always had great promise…”

The Edinburgh Festival was a great success, and crowds have been pouring into the big Monet show. But as far as visual arts in the rest of the Scottish capital, things have been decidedly less promoted. “Altogether there are well over 100 exhibitions to choose from, but the sector is too fragmented to reach the public it should command. It is almost impossible even to find out everything that is going on.”

Choosing Santiago Calatrava to design the tranport hub under the World Trade Center site is both “obvious and more than a little risky,” writes Christopher Hawthorne. “Why obvious? Because no architect in the world can match Calatrava’s talent for investing complex transportation projects, which are often pretty bland architecturally, with the kind of eye-catching, high-design appeal the public is expecting at Ground Zero. His buildings are rigorously conceived and meticulously executed but also playful, airy, and imaginative—a perfect combination of right and left brain. Why risky? Because Calatrava’s work has a personality—a pristine, sometimes aloof perfectionism—that seems an odd fit for the constricted and politically charged Ground Zero site.”

Venice has sunk 24 inches in 300 years, says a new study based on historic paintings. “The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, analyzed eight paintings by Giovanni Antonio Canal, nicknamed Canaletto, (1697-1768) and three by his lesser-known nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720-1780). Both artists produced their paintings with the help of a portable camera obscura, a lens that projects images onto sketch pads. The trick, described by Leonardo da Vinci 250 years earlier, enabled them to reproduce accurate urban landscapes, complete with the lines of green scum formed by algae left on canal-side buildings by retreating high tides.”

Is there a question anymore about the traditionalist turn art has taken in the past couple of years? “In these times when any visitor to Times Square can sit for an artist whose oeuvre includes fine sketches of Tupac Shakur, James Childs has turned a clever living immortalizing what was once called upper-case-S Society, in a heroic, labor-intensive style you might have thought even more antiquated than Society itself. Working in the formal discipline of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or John Singer Sargent, Mr. Childs takes about four such commissions a year, for which he charges $150,000 and up for full-length portraits.”