Category: visual

The Venice Biennale has been compromised and ruined by politics, suggests Laura Cumming. “Fifty festivals, a golden year, but no birthday celebrations. The Biennale has become so worried about its inflated status as the Grandest Show on Earth that it wouldn’t dream of congratulating itself in these desperate modern times. It is still a multinational market, of course, where droves of dealers tout their artists to rich collectors and curators on the look-out. But the real world presses in, and the director, Francesco Bonami, wrings his hands.”

The count of items stolen from the Iraq National Museum is going up. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement say that as of June 13 “the official count of missing items had reached 6,000 and was climbing as museum and Customs investigators proceeded with an inventory of three looted storerooms. The June 13 total was double the number of stolen items reported by Customs a week earlier,” and the final total will likely be much higher.

The Guardian takes six pieces of contemporary art out of the galleries and puts them into private houses. How would ordinary people feel about living with a Tracey Emins or a Chapman Brothers artwork? “Many participants expressed anxiety about exposing their ignorance, aware of a kind of knowing exclusivity that characterises the art world. But they also expressed a sneaking suspicion that this world might be applauding something empty and banal.”

China has arrested a museum official in Chengde, a city north of Beijing, for “stealing some of the precious antiquities he was supposed to be guarding. It is the biggest such theft reported in half a century of Communist rule.” The official is accused of “stealing 158 relics during 12 years, substituting fake artifacts or doctoring inventories to conceal his crimes.”

Cartoons are more and more showing up in “serious” art. ” ‘Making art from cartoon figures today ‘is like painting a Madonna in the Renaissance’. With cultural literacy at a low ebb, a riff on Superman communicates more universally than Bible stories, mythology, or fairy tales. Archie and Veronica have become our Aries and Venus.”

The Peabody Essex Museum in Salem Massachusetts has a new home designed by Moshe Safdie, writes Robert Campbell, and it’s a winner. The old museum “was a hodgepodge of buildings and additions that accreted over more than a century and a half. With the new addition – and the dozen or more historic houses in Salem owned by the museum – PEM now has, according to its director, Dan Monroe, 88 percent as much floor area as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. A local provincial museum has morphed into a potential national icon. It’s not easy to fit so big a museum into the modest surroundings of historic Salem. On the whole, Safdie pulls it off.

How do you clean an icon such as Michelangelo’s David? Carefully, of course. But it turns out that the restorer hired to do the job was maybe too careful. When her bosses insisted on a more invasive cleaning process, she quit. “I hated to do that, because the David is the best job a restorer could have. But I simply could not be party to diminishing Michelangelo’s masterpiece.” Will the alternative method destroy David? “Unlikely. Short of taking a hammer to it like Piero Cannata, or blowing it up, it is, as Ms Parronchi insists, pretty hard to do that.”

One critic laments the crowded Venice Biennale: “I don’t mean to be philistine, but art in quantity – black box, video, car-boot-sale installation art – is not a pretty sight. Nor, come to that, are we in such numbers. Too much of now about us, too much dogma of the hour. And too much perspiration. We don’t sweat well in the art world. Here we all are, anyway, come for the vernissage, which literally means varnishing but now denotes the two or three days set aside for professionals to make their judgments while the paint dries. Since there is precious little in contemporary art that needs varnishing, a better translation of vernissage might be The Shining – every critic and curator on the planet, and not a few artists to boot, thrown together in a confined space and left to go berserk.”

The Emanuel Vigeland Museum in Osler has hundreds more Emanuel Vigelands than it thought it had. This week electricians who ventured into the museum’s attic for some repair work discovered several hundred sketches signed by Vigeland. The museum has no idea how they got there.

An ossuary thought to have been the resting place of the Biblical James is a modern fake, not an ancient relic, says a commission of antiquities experts. “A media frenzy followed last October’s announcement that André Lemaire of the Sorbonne University in Paris had found an inscription – James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus – on a light brown limestone box of the type commonly used for burials in first-century A.D. in Jerusalem. It seemed that this box, or ossuary, had once held the bones of James, brother of the biblical Jesus, who was stoned to death in A.D. 62 according to the historian Flavius Josephus. Publicized in the magazine Biblical Archaeology Review, the ossuary was hailed by Time magazine as possibly ‘the most important discovery in the history of New Testament archaeology’.”