Category: visual

The Brooklyn Children’s Museum – opened in 1899 and the first museum for children – is cutting its outreach programs and charging more for admission after having its city funding cut. The small museum attracts 260,000 visitors a year.

The California Center for the Arts Museum in Escondido is closing July 20. It’s said to be a “temporary closure” but as the staff is being let go, it looks like the museum is done. Why? The CCA blames reduced state funding. “Though it consumes only $438,000 of the center’s current $7.3 million budget, the center says it can no longer afford to keep the museum open with reduced state funding.”

“There are hundreds of artists and works in the Venice Biennale, which opened to the public last Sunday. So many voices and idioms, so many fractured dialogues, so many languages. Everyone comes to Venice, but everyone comes from somewhere else. There can be no totalising critique or curatorial stance, nor any shared artistic value we can depend on. Only one thing is certain: that pain is universal.”

One of the more entertaining artists at this year’s Venice Biennale is Lala, a 20-year-old chimpanzee. Not just any old ape, but a simian Sophia Loren, known for her “classic” Italian caper movie Bongo Bongo, and now the star of the biennale’s most bizarre happening, Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A. Her installation turns on assembling six-lettered dice to spell Utopia.”

Proposals are being considered for a memorial on the site of the World Trade Center. Such competitions are necessarily good, writes Christopher Benfey. “In the end, we’re likely to get a celebrity sculptor who burnishes his or her reputation with an idiosyncratically designed?and inevitably ‘controversial’?monument. Or a sentimental and crowd-pleasing idea like the ‘soaring’ memorial envisaged by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. So, I have a simple proposal. My proposal is that we put nothing at all in that space?that it be left as a hollowed-out void.”

Peter Fischli and David Weiss won the Golden Lion for best work exhibited in the international exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale.

Looting of Iraqi archaeological sites is continuing, accoring to a survey of the country. “The worst looting is taking place in the south of Iraq. Umma, Isin and Adab – Sumerian settlements of the 3rd millennium BC, north west of Nasiriyah – are still being pillaged on a massive scale.”

Eli Broad’s $60 million gift to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art towards the construction of a new wing is being hailed as an unexpected windfall at a time when many museums are having to postpone or cancel expansion projects. But the gift’s impact may be more far-reaching than even Broad himself expected, says Christopher Reynolds: “Although its key goal is the creation of a new contemporary art building, LACMA’s leaders are already imagining how this will change the shape of their institution.”

When did it become so impossible for an artist to sit down and crank out a recognizable representation of an actual human being? Has contemporary art become so self-conscious, and so detached from the real world, that a decent portrait is no longer achievable? The dearth of quality portrait painters is such a problem, in fact, that Britain’s National Portrait Gallery has been reduced to holding a contest to find an artist capable of doing the job. The gallery generally “has to make do with the artists available; and when they are famous in their own right, it then has to deal with the consequences, for example, of blowing untold funds on a Lucian Freud or a Hockney.”

“In an environment of unprecedented artistic variety, where almost anything is permissible and worthy of encouragement, Expressionism stands out today as the one strand of art that is woefully unfashionable. Expressionism is not quite as dirty a word, mind you, as it was in the 1930s, when the Nazis labelled it ‘degenerate’ and when, adding insult to injury, Thomas Mann contributed the idea that German expressionism and Nazism sprang from the same root of emotional self-abandonment. Nevertheless, although there have been subsequent periods when forms of expressionism were revived, the word is now generally used pejoratively.”