Category: visual

Dia:Beacon, which opened last week in an old Nabisco factory about an hour north of Manhattan, may be the largest contemporary art museum in the world, with its 300,000 square feet of space. “To understand the ethos of the Dia Center, and how it came to convert such a cathedral-like space as Dia:Beacon, you have to go back to Dia’s inception.”

Has the British Museum mislabeled a marble fragment from the Acropolis Marbles? The museum says it is a left arm. An expert maintains it is a right arm from another part of the pediment altogether. “That is not an armpit. They have mistaken the little depression between the tendons behind the arm for the armpit itself. It is a right arm. It won’t fit the figure of Iris because it doesn’t come from that figure.”

In a classic case of aesthetic symbols confronting political and financial reality, [architect Daniel Libeskind] is fighting to preserve the form – and, with it, the meaning – of his proposal for the 16-acre former site of the World Trade Center. Libeskind also has been forced to confront accusations from a New York City architect that he fibbed when he claimed that, every Sept. 11, on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks that brought down the Trade Center’s twin towers, the sun would shine without shadow on an outdoor plaza he calls ‘the Wedge of Light’. While Libeskind seems to have weathered the plaza controversy, it remains unclear if he will be able to retain control over his design — or whether developer Larry Silverstein, who holds the lease to the former World Trade Center site, will twist it beyond recognition.”

“British Museum director Neil MacGregor returned this week from Baghdad, which he visited as part of a Unesco delegation. In an exclusive interview with The Art Newspaper, he reported that three separate storerooms at the National Museum had been looted, in addition to the galleries. Although the number of objects which were taken was very much smaller than had originally been feared, they include some which are ‘extraordinarily important’.”

The Cellini saltcellar recently stolen from Austria’s Kunsthistorisches Museum is said to be worth $58 million. How come so much? “The figure they cited is stunning, and no wonder: It comes out of an empyrean that few objects ever visit. Art, like any other commodity, receives its worth partly from the quality of the artifact and partly from its scarcity. But the Cellini is unique—and not just in the sense in which all artworks are unique: Nothing even remotely like it exists. Lose a Warhol, and you can always get another one. Rembrandts are hard to find, but not impossible. But there’s only one Cellini table piece.”

The Canadian government intends to announce a new $100 million museum of Canadian history and politics. But critics including opposition MPs and the museum community say that “the money would be better spent helping cash-strapped institutions across the country. ‘Museums in Canada are desperately underfunded. Some even are verging on bankruptcy.”

The model for Herzog and de Meuron’s recently announced stadium for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games is a crossover from structure to poetry, writes Giles Worsley. “When built, it will rise 67 metres in the heart of the city and hold 100,000 spectators. The model captures the sense of ambiguity that increasingly surrounds the architects’ buildings, particularly where façade and structure meet. The Basel-based firm that designed Tate Modern has used the idea of a nest of twigs to give external form to the building, a lattice of massive concrete beams, through which spectators penetrate to the heart of the building – the stands.”

St. Petersburg is, “without doubt, one of the world’s most exquisite cities. Yes, it is flanked by meretricious modern design, encircled by brutal Soviet-era, high-rise apartment blocks and smells of grinding poverty. Its water is often unsafe to drink, its crowded trolley-buses are rusting away and its pavements are forced to tackle the shifts of fetid marshland below them. But, when you walk along Nevsky Prospect or catch sight of any of the city’s brightly coloured, set-piece buildings, when you spy the golden spires of fairy-tale fortresses and heavenly churches or the seemingly infinite march of classical arcades, their vaults lit by the sun sparkling from the Dutch and Venetian-style canals, you feel that this is paradise, not urban purgatory.”

A 400,000-year-old stone object unearthed in Morocco could be the world’s oldest attempt at sculpture.

“In the clubby art world where priceless works are entrusted to dealers and brokers on a promise and a handshake, Michael Cohen, a highly regarded art broker, borrowed millions from prestigious art dealers such as Sotheby’s and was handed a Picasso from another prominent dealer. But according to a complaint filed in US District Court in Manhattan, Cohen fled two years ago, swindling the dealers of millions of dollars and taking a valuable piece of art, as well.”