Category: visual

Daniel and Nina Libeskind are battling with the various competing interests who want to control what goes up on the site of the World Trade Center. “At issue is their measure of control over what is built at Ground Zero—whether what goes up there reflects Mr. Libeskind’s vision, or the maelstrom of competing interests that has come to define the story of the World Trade Center. If the Libeskinds have one thing going for them, it is themselves. The two—with matching salt-and-pepper hair, glasses, sharp eyes and black clothing—have a way of refracting off each other. They finish each other’s sentences. They interpret each other for their audience. But they are complementary rather than similar.”

A group of the Metropolitan Museum’s neighbors is mobilizing to oppose the museum’s expansion plans. Museum foes are circulating a letter: “If the Museum goes ahead, it will own our lives until at least 2015. We have a window of opportunity to act now, before the first jackhammer bursts or the first blast shakes. Can you imagine the negative impact on the value of your home if trying to sell during the 12-year assault? We could stop the whole magilla.” But now a group of opponents to the Met’s opponents has sprung up, charging self-interest…

The Basel Art Fair is “strategically timed to consolidate the impressions made and deals struck in Venice [at the Biennale]. This year we could not wait to leave the pavilioned heat and enter the temperate climate of Switzerland and the air-conditioned neutrality of Basel’s exhibition halls. It was not only the most searing heat since 1908, nor humidity pushing 90 per cent, nor 40,000 art professionals who for three days were simply pushing, that made this the most disappointing Biennale for many years. There was a strong sense that the exhibition’s format had run its course.”

Now you don’t have to travel to Rome to see Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel paintings. The Vatican has put its art online. “Now, at the click of a mouse, they will now be able to zoom up to the recently restored ceiling, under which the painter – who only wanted to be a sculptor – spent endless months, between 1508 and 1512.” The Vatican website gets 50 million visitors a month.

Grenville L Winthrop was “arguably the most discriminating and independent-minded of all 20th-century American collectors. Yet his collection of 4,000 paintings, drawings and objects is far less well-known than theirs.” He left his collection to Harvard’s Fogg Museum with instructions the art was not to be loaned. “Then, about five years ago, the director of the Fogg looked again at the fine print in Winthrop’s will. The document stipulated that, if the museum ever lent a work from the bequest, it would be obliged to pay to the Foundlings Hospital in New York City the sum of $100,000 – a fortune in 1937 when the will was drawn up, but not such a big deal in the late 1990s. In a coup so outrageous I smile every time I think about it, the director simply sent a cheque to the happy orphans, and, hey presto, the magic spell had been broken. The museum was free to lend any of the pictures anywhere, any time, and to anyone who asked. Art that had been immured in an ivory tower went global.”

Many people have worries about contemporary art, and the Venice Biennale can make those worries rear up at you. But “you don’t have to like it all in order to embrace it. You’re allowed to make distinctions and your distinctions are as likely to be right as anyone else’s. Only a certain percentage of what is in fashion now will stand the test of time. In this way, contemporary art is not so very different from the art of the past.”

Amersterdam’s Rijksmuseum, or national gallery, is getting a makeover. The new design “envisions spacious, bright exhibition halls, better facilities, and a grand entrance hall large enough to shelter guests from the characteristically wet Dutch weather – instead of having them wait in the lines that now stretch outside the building for most of the year. The $230 million renovation, scheduled to run from 2004 to 2008, will be the most extensive since the original four-towered building by Pierre Cuyper opened in 1885. It was then the southern entrance to the city and accommodated only a tenth of the 1.2 million visitors it now receives each year.”

A prized JC Dahl painting stolen in Norway a couple of weeks ago has been returned by the thieves. They “either got cold feet or decided the painting was more of a liability than an asset for them. They returned it using a local commercial radio station, P4, as intermediary.”

The Taj Mahal glows with light at dawn and twilight. But “before the Indian government stepped in at the weekend, the 17th century marble monument’s source of illumination was in danger of being cut off by a tourist complex of shopping malls, restaurants, multiplex cinemas and other entertainment facilities. Construction on the project, less than 300 metres from the Taj Mahal, began in November but was halted by the Indian government, which said the new structure could divert the river during monsoon rains and damage the base of the monument.”

Hiro Yamagata is one of the most commercially successful artists alive today. “His work, much of which is sold at shopping malls, generates an estimated $4 billion in sales a year.” Now he’s covered two building-size cubes on the Yokohama waterfront with mylar, shooting light into them to make them shimmer and pulse with color.