Category: visual

The new Dia home in upstate New York is big and comodious to large-scale art, writes Peter Plagens. And at the start it will get many curious visitors. But the flow will diminish and the question remain: Is there really an audience for the kind of art Dia advocates?

It hasn’t been a good year for Thomas Krens and his Guggenheim empire. The Las Vegas outpost so gloriously hyped when it opened has closed, and is likely to be demolished soon, and the plans for a massive new Gehry-designed home in Manhattan are on indefinite hold. The Guggenheim’s latest exhibit of “classics” of modern art could be seen as just one more example of how the museum is being forced to retreat from the bold, avant-garde stance it adopted in the 1990s. But, says James Gardner, there’s more to this new-old approach than just a reflection of hard times: “It’s hard to find a single work among the 100 odd pieces in this show that is anything less than exemplary.”

“Dominique Perrault, best known for designing the French National Library in Paris, and his team beat 10 other entries to design the new building for the Mariinsky Theater in the most important architectural event in Russia in 70 years.” But not everyone is happy with Perrault’s dome-based design, which involves a lot of black marble and gold glass, and looks a bit like a half-inflated hot air balloon. Most of the concerns are of the practical variety: how do we clean it, will all the snow collapse it, and how much will it cost to build?

“The man behind the Baltic – Europe’s newest contemporary arts complex – has quit as its director. Sune Nordgren steered the centre for contemporary arts in Gateshead, through it’s first turbulent year… The £46m project transformed the former Baltic Flour Mills, a disused 1950s grain warehouse, into an international contemporary arts venue.” Nordgren is heading home to Norway, where he will become the director of the National Museum for Art, Architecture and Design.

Chinese officials are scrambling to deal with the discovery that large chunks of the famous Great Wall are no longer standing, and more will likely be gone in the near future. “Of the portion built during the Ming Dynasty, less than 20 percent is still intact. A probe of 100 sections drew the alarming conclusion that a third of the structure has already vanished.” Survey teams were shocked to find “local farmers living along the Great Wall simply unaware of what it is. They witnessed bricks being carted away by people to build houses, sheep corrals and pigsties. One 1,000-meter section in Hebei Province, which neighbors Beijing, vanished in the space of a year after locals took stones and foundation materials for repairs.”

Wonder where those garish statues of former dictators end up? “Nearly 20 statues of leaders and heroes of authoritarian regimes occupy the rolling private garden of Harlan R. Crow, a Dallas real estate investor. Heavyweights like Stalin, Mao and Lenin stand among lesser-knowns like Klement Gottwald, the first Communist president of Czechoslovakia. Many of the statues, some as tall as 20 feet, were bought from the sculptors or from public officials as regimes crumbled. A few, like the large bust of Princip, were acquired as bullets whizzed by.”

In a report withheld for three years, an audit of the troubled Barnes Foundation is deeply critical of the way the foundation was managed. It is particularly critical of former director Richard Glanton. “Under a section titled ‘Conflicts of Interest,’ the audit outlined a series of Barnes transactions that it said Mr. Glanton engaged in with outside business partners, without informing the foundation’s board. It said he ran up more than $225,000 in travel and entertainment expenses; tried to barter the foundation’s banking business for support on the board; and let two women live in Barnes properties under unusual circumstances.”

A couple of London brothers have won a contest to hang a rare Canaletto painting in their home for a day. The program is intended to win new audiences for art, and the painting arrived with a curator and security guard. One of the brothers “admitted he had not been a huge fan of Canaletto before winning the painting. He said he now thought Canaletto was ‘awesome’. Though the painting is returning home in the evening, Alex said the art fund was giving them a copy as a reminder of their day as blue-chip art collectors.”

Planners of a project at San Francisco Airport hired Brooklyn artist Vito Acconci to make a piece of public art for the project. But five of his ideas were rejected before one stuck. And drivers coming out of the terminal might not even be aware that they’re looking at public art…

Monday was the deadline for plans to be submitted for a memorial at the site of the former World Trade Center. “By the 5 p.m. deadline, thousands of proposals, enough to fill a caravan of delivery trucks, had been received at the nondescript, six-story warehouse at 515 West 36th Street in Manhattan. Entries started being accepted on June 9, and the last ones trickled in for more than an hour after the deadline. The contest is expected to be the largest design competition ever, exceeding even the 1,421 designs submitted for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Little more is likely to be heard about the proposals until September, when about five finalists are to be announced.”