Category: visual

The BBC is having difficulty choosing an architect and design for a new concert hall. “Faced with the embarrassing discovery that none of the five architects it had invited to design a showcase concert hall at White City came anywhere near meeting its budget, the BBC is having to learn quickly that an architectural competition is no guarantee of great architecture. On one level, the corporation has only itself to blame. The real problem with architectural competitions is not of the BBC’s making. It, at least, is serious about building – but it has been swept along by the illusion that architectural competitions are a cultural duty – a myth perpetuated by self-important clients and socially dysfunctional architects.”

“As technology and programming continue to be refined, the border between artwork and interpretive information will probably blur further. All sorts of boundaries in the arts got blurred or erased beginning in the ’60s, with the rise of Pop art, Fluxus, Happenings, earthworks and other innovations. We may be witnessing the erasure of yet one more.”

The Whitney’s “American Effect” show is an idea worth exploring, on its face, writes Blake Gopnik. But there’s a fatal flaw in the working out of the idea. “Many, maybe most, of the dozens of brilliant artists working today aren’t American, and it’s hard to think of a single one of those foreigners whose art, however socially engaged, centers on ideas about America. Of course, that’s why none of those artists is in the Whitney show. The exhibition mostly features little-known foreign artists who deserve their lack of recognition.”

Thirty years after it was built (in 1972), Smith College’s fine arts center was “uninhabitable.” Why did this relatively new building fail to hold up while Smith’s other buildings are doing fine after a century? “Before the era of the modern movement, buildings were built in predictable and conventional ways. Builders knew how to build in that manner. Architects didn’t ask them to do anything else. But with the arrival of modernism, architects began to invent new kinds of construction. They experimented. A gap opened between the traditional builder and the modernist architect. No longer could the builder correct the architect’s mistakes. What happened to Andrews’s building is only too typical.”

“The new chief of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, is Irvin Lippman, 55, a man credited with doubling the annual budget and raising attendance at the Columbus, Ohio, art museum over the past eight years.”

“One of Norwegian art history’s most important treasures, Edvard Munch’s Puberty, is being slowly destroyed. The paint has become so loose on the canvas that it cannot be hung and must be laid flat and covered with a protective cloth.”

The US Interior Department is creating art on a grand scale. “Employing artistic symbolism, the mural is intended to present their missions and activities in terms of Norton’s oft-expressed philosophy of arriving at environmental and conservation decisions through “collaboration and cooperation” (i.e., with the help of mining, oil drilling and logging companies). Not even Robert Rauschenberg, with all his glued-together-trash collages, attempted anything so ambitious.”

The oldest observatory in Europe has been discovered in Germany. It predates Stonehenge. “The site, which is estimated to be around 7,000 years old and measures 75 meters in diameter, provides the first insights into the spiritual and religious worlds of Europe’s earliest farmers.”

The Baghdad National Museum is not the first to be looted during war. “During Lebanon’s tumultuous 15-year civil war, the Beirut National Museum lay in ruins. The museum was hit by artillery shells. Snipers fired from its upper floors, even boring a rifle hole into one of the ancient pieces of art. The fate of its priceless collections was unknown…”