Category: visual

Iraqi’s say widespread looting of archaeological sites is continuing, despite please for help to the Americans. “On a visit Sunday, three sites near here were pocked with freshly dug holes and littered with hastily abandoned shovels, indicating looting in the last day or two. At one spot, about two dozen people ran off when they saw approaching trucks. At Isan Bakhriat, site of the ancient city of Isin to the north of here, more than 100 looters were openly digging out and selling urns, sculptures and cuneiform tablets. ‘It’s happening at almost every site. They are smart. They take the antiquities that they know have value, and they know how to get them out of the country’.”

The recent looting at the Iraq Museum has bolstered a project to digitize images of ancient artifacts. The looting “has graphically shown the need to make images of these tablets. The digital library is arguably the most important project in our field. Digital initiatives should be used aggressively to buffer ourselves against natural or man-made catastrophes. What happened in the Iraq museum is really an object lesson in why it is important.”

Richard Dorment describes this year’s annual Royal Academy Summer Exhibition as “the largest festival of bad art in Europe.” The quality of chosen work is mediocre this year after a couple of good years. “Let me start with the amateurs. By sheer chance, I happen to know four people – none is a professional artist – who regularly attend a weekly painting class run by Maggi Hambling. Any single one of them is a better painter than most of the artists chosen from the open submissions this year.”

“With buildings by Peter Eisenman in Columbus and Cincinnati, and by Frank Gehry in Toledo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland, the state of Ohio is beginning to seem as hospitable to cutting-edge architecture as the Netherlands. But avant-garde architects are getting commissions from small cities and institutions all over the country, not only because such places are eager to use architecture as a way of establishing their cultural credentials. Smaller cities are less likely to be encumbered by the political and economic pressures that affect projects in big cities, and, these days, they are more likely to take risks.” As in two new buildings from Zaha Hadid and Frank Gehry…

Who are the best-selling living artists in the world right now? Jasper Johns clocks in at No. 1. “Johns’ artworks have sold for more than £92m over the last three decades, the survey by magazine Artreview showed.”

Should museums take a hand in running British schools? That’s a proposal made last week education secretary, Charles Clarke to representatives of major London museums. “Most museums already work closely with schools through outreach and education programmes. But Mr Clarke’s proposals go further, and involve giving museums, which have charitable status and receive government and local subsidies, a role in the management and running of schools.”

The Canadian government plans to “turn a near century-old train station in downtown Ottawa into a museum on Canadian history and politics. ‘Our political history is a rich one that needs to be told. This centre will be a meeting place where academics, students and visitors will be able to learn how Canada came about’.” The project is expected to cost $90 million, and museum critics are complaining that the money coule be better spent helping museums that are already struggling for funding.

A pair of art students in London plan to implant human DNA in trees and grow them. “If an apple tree was used, it would provide an edible as well as a visible reminder. Like the rest of the tree, the fruit would contain human DNA. ‘Implanting your grandmother’s DNA into an apple tree brings a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Granny Smith’. But would you eat an apple from your grandma’s tree’?”

Americans checking out Baghdad’s Museum of Antiquities have suggested that museum staff might have participated in stealing from the museum. And that the museum leadership’s membership in the Baathist Party might disqualify them from helping to rebuild the museum. But “for the foreign archaeologists who now throng the museum, the idea that their colleagues could have colluded in its desecration is too appalling to contemplate. They tend to take a relaxed view of the Baathist credentials of [museum director Donny] George and the head of the antiquities board, Jabir Khalil Ibrahim; no one in a senior position, they say, was unqualified.”

What will define success for Dia’s new Beacon home north of Manhattan? “Is this the kind of work that will bring in 100,000 visitors a year? That’s the number Dia hopes for. So does the State of New York and Beacon and its surrounding towns, which have chipped in $2.7 million toward the project so far and have visions of Guggenheim Bilbao dancing in their heads. Dia: Beacon offers some of the most potent art experiences to be found anywhere, in some of the most well-considered settings. But it was conceived largely to present difficult work for long durations in one space. And for much of what it offers, difficult is the word.”