Category: visual

Now that the Chapman Brothers have been shortlisted for this year’s Turner Prize, a wider audience is sure to be examining their work. The inevitable casual examinations of their work isn’t exactly a good thing, they say. “The reason I say that is not because I intend to offend people who have a casual encounter with art because casual encounters can be very rewarding and interesting. But I’m obsessed with countering the idea that it’s necessary to those people’s lives and the necessity is brought to bear by people who have an institutional interest in art.”

“The Chapman brothers are the best-known of the shortlisted artists, and recently hit the headlines for adding comical and grotesque faces to Goya etchings. Their work is often restricted to adult viewings because of its content, and they took part in 1997’s Sensation exhibition with dolls with penises instead of noses.”

There is a flurry of spacecraft from earth on its way to Mars and beyond. “For now, Beagle 2 has stolen the limelight. It goes into space with a spot painting by the British artist Damien Hirst – which also acts as a colour calibration chart for its cameras – and a callsign composed by the Britpop band Blur.”

Canada’s most controversial artwork? It’s got to be “Greg Curnoe’s notorious magnum opus of 1968, the 170-metre-long Homage to the R-34 (the title refers to the first dirigible to cross the Atlantic to North America from Britain), otherwise known as the Dorval Mural, a spectacular, Technicolor work that existed at its intended site – the arrivals area of the Montreal airport – for just eight days before being packed up and stored. The mural was deemed by the federal Department of Transport that commissioned it to be too controversial, too provocatively antiwar and anti-American, to greet our Vietnam-weary visitors from south of the 49th parallel. Since its fiery demise, Homage to the R-34 has remained sequestered in storage crates, briefly coming up for air at the National Gallery of Canada in 1998, when the mural was finally officially transferred to its collection.”

War in the Middle East is destroying some of the region’s most historic buildings. In Israel, “the damage to Nablus was awesome. The town was founded by the Romans in about 70AD – it’s about the same age as London – and it became an important Crusader town and, later, a trading centre for the Ottoman Empire. Buildings from these eras survive – or did, until a few months ago. Over 100 important historical buildings just aren’t there any more. Nablus was the most important historic town in the Middle East, and it has been devastated.”

Blake Gopnik and the Hirshorn’s Ned Rifkin talk about how museums protect artwork. “Is it possible that museums are actually too eager to preserve their art? That preservation, in a sense, has become fetishized to the point where it can detract from the art experience, rather than serving it? How should a museum strike a balance between protection and presentation?”

“When the Vennice Biennale opens to the public in two weeks, Fred Wilson will be America’s artist. His $650,000 show, titled ‘Speak of Me As I Am’ and organized by the curator Kathleen Goncharov of the List Visual Arts Center at M.I.T., will scrutinize some longstanding American themes — immigration and integration — but will view them through Venetian history.” So how was it decided that Mr. Wilson would represent us? A panel of course…

Cincinnati’s new arts center is not the type of outsized, over-the-top structure generally associated with today’s high-profile architecture. In fact, Zaha Hadid’s design is in many ways the antithesis of the Blockbuster Building, which may be part of the reason that critics have been falling all over themselves to praise it. Benjamin Forgey is impressed with the building, if not with the hype, and says that the museum will reflect well on its hometown. “For the city itself, which contributed money along with the state and private donors, the architecture is a coup. The building will become an “early Hadid,” a period piece folks will fight to save from the wrecking ball in a half-century or so.”

“A voluptuous Victorian masterpiece by John William Waterhouse [depicting a sultry Cleopatra reclining on a tiger skin,] which had disappeared for more than a hundred years, has turned up in a log cabin in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. The discovery was announced yesterday by Christie’s, just days after the news that another lost Waterhouse had been tracked down by Sotheby’s to an Icelandic trawler owner.”

It seems as if the Sculpture Garden may be to this era what the large-scale mural was to an earlier time: a relatively cheap, attractive way to feature art in a public place, and a method of urban beautification which doesn’t require the razing of neighborhoods or the construction of hundred-million-dollar buildings. Denver has had a sculpture garden since 1997, but it has sat empty for most of the period since it was built. Kyle MacMillan says that Denver needs to start branding itself, art-wise: “So far, at least, no single acquisition has become a signature work that is widely identified with the city, one that art aficionados would come to Denver specifically to see.”