Category: visual

This week, Atlanta’s High Museum of Art will close for two months of extensive renovation and expansion, the latest in a string of American museums to break ground on expensive new wings. But even more impressive than the renovation plans is the $5 million facility where the museum will house its 11,000-piece collection during construction. “Even with its artwork under one roof, the High will have enough room left over to accelerate a pack rat’s heart: 21,472 square feet of amply lit, high-ceilinged, generously shelved capacity… The storage facility is equipped with high-tech fixtures, too, such as the shiny white vapor-tight cabinets ($4,000 apiece) that currently house the ceramics collection.”

In the 1950s Frank Lloyd Wright went to Baghdad and drew up plans for “rebuilding Baghdad into a glittering capital of Islamic culture like the one that once dazzled the world.” Librarians at the Library of Congress in Washington DC have the plans, and some suggest they should be used. “Iraqis think we want to kill their culture. Yet when America’s greatest architect drew a plan for Baghdad in 1957, where did he turn for inspiration? Not to American or European ‘modernism,’ which was so fashionable at the time, but to Arab and Persian architecture, which had shaped the famous Baghdad of the 8th and 9th century.”

“As contemporary artists increasingly turn to wallpaper as their chosen medium, this superficial material is gaining some serious respect. In fact, artists have been dabbling in wallpaper since the 16th century (or earlier), among them Albrecht Dürer, Thomas Rowlandson (whose ‘Grotesque Borders’ caricatured the British upper crust) and Salvador Dalí. Andy Warhol used it famously in 1966, when he papered the Leo Castelli Gallery with his ‘Cow Wallpaper,’ a fuchsia-and-yellow series of repeated bovine heads, accompanied by floating silver balloons. Like Warhol, most artists reviving this tradition do so with ironic or subversive results.”

Perhaps the menu for this year’s Venice Biennale looked good on paper. But it turned out as a mish-mash. “What was supposed to signal democracy, open-endedness and all-inclusiveness appeared more like an event headed by a curator reluctant to shoulder such a herculean task on his own.”

“The Chapman brothers, the most studiedly shocking of the rapidly ageing generation of young British artists, yesterday won the £25,000 Charles Wollaston Award for the most distinguished work in the Royal Academy summer exhibition. The brothers were more genuinely shocked yesterday than any viewer of their works: despite their fame, and infamy, they have never before won a major art prize.”

Art restorers in Pisa, Italy have discovered that bacteria applied to medieval frescoes that were covered in glue 50 years years can cut through the glue and reveal the painting. “Scientists from Milan University have shown that the bacterium Pseudomonas stutzeri, applied with water on cotton wool, can eat through 80% of the glue in about 10 hours. Chunks of the 14th- and 15th-century series of frescoes at the Camposanto (cemetery) were removed for repair and restoration in the 1950s” when they were covered in glue, and restorers have been trying to figure out how to remove the substance ever since.

A Brazilian court has blocked construction of a new Guggenheim Museum in Brazil. “The ban follows public outcry that the $US250 million project is a luxury the city cannot afford. Many of Rio’s citizens said the money should be spent on fighting crime or improving education and health care in the city’s teeming shantytowns. Billboards have appeared showing a photograph of a homeless girl drinking from a puddle on the sidewalk with the caption, ‘Does Rio need such a museum? and the Guggenheim name encircled in red.”

“In a number of recent and high profile instances, certain individuals, card-carrying artists and regular civilians both, have acted upon the urge to respond critically with a physical intervention into a piece of art. It would appear that the art world has gone intervention crazy. You could blame it on Guy Debord and the Situationist International with their fondness for challenging the gallery environment with dynamic interventions. But that’s too obvious. As usual, I blame Brian Eno.”

By accident, Michael Kimmelman finds himself at the opening preview of the Venice Biennale. “There are gems to find, although the picking is especially tough this year, the 50th edition of the event. This is the largest, most sprawling and also by far the sloppiest, most uninspired, enervating and passionless biennale that I can recall. The curator, Francesco Bonami, has provided the usual nebulous title, pregnant with meaning but signifying nothing. This time it’s ‘Dreams and Conflicts: The Dictatorship of the Viewer.’ It doesn’t begin to account for the miasma that Mr. Bonami has allowed to be assembled.”

“Since the start of the current Palestinian uprising more than two years ago, archaeology in the disputed territories has ground to a virtual standstill. And the demands placed on security forces on both sides have left many important archaeological sites vulnerable to looting.”