Category: visual

The Dia Foundation’s new outpost in beacon, an hour north of New York City, “changes the landscape for art in Ameria” writes Michael Kimmelman. “The museum, the largest one yet for contemporary art, enshrines part of a generation of big-thinking artists in a former Nabisco factory, a building with nearly a quarter of a million square feet of plain exhibition space.”

Security at the Austrian museum where a valuable Celline was stolen last weekend was lax to the point of absurdity. “The Florentine set, valued at about ?50m (£35m), was stolen at about 4am on Sunday. The burglary was bold, but accomplished with ease. Entry through a first-floor window was aided by some convenient scaffolding and the thief then smashed the unprotected glass display case. Entry to escape with the exquisite 25cm object can have taken no more than 54 seconds, according to a police reconstruction. Halfway through that brief period the museum’s alarm system rang. The guard switched it off – before it could have alerted the police – assuming that it was yet another false alarm of the type that occurs in the museum once a week on average. It was left to a cleaning lady to discover the theft more than four hours after the event.”

The artist who painting a big yellow “CAUTION: Low flying planes” on the side of a building in Lower Manhattan says he didn’t mean to offend his neighbors who are now complaining. “His 10-by-14-foot painting, he says, is about the terrorist threat. ‘It’s still out there. . . . [The painting is] a statement saying it’s not over’.” One resident is surprised by the negative reaction: “If that was a Tommy Hilfiger ad, nobody would be complaining. . . . If it was a 12-year-old with too much lipstick on, that would have been all right. But this is not?”

Chicago has long had a reputation for great architecture… home of the skyscraper, and all… Now a new generation of great Chicago architecture is going up, and boy, is it sexy…

After Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art got a grant in 2000 to drop its admission charges, the museum saw a dramatic increase in visitors. Now Telstra – the free-admission underwriter – has agreed to continue the sponsorship for three more years. “Telstra will inject more than $500,000 annually into the MCA in a three-year arrangement to underwrite the free-entry policy. The deal continues an original sponsorship arrangement that allowed the gallery to scrap its $12 admission fee in mid-2000.”

“Dozens of Jewish sites, artifacts, documents, rare books and manuscripts are being discovered, analyzed and restored in southern Italy and Sicily. This work by scholars and government authorities is beginning to flesh out the largely unknown story of vibrant yet long-lost communities of Jews that inhabited the region from Roman times to the end of the Middle Ages. Jews were expelled from southern Italy, known then as the Kingdom of Naples, in the 16th century. Few returned even after the ban was lifted in the 18th century.”

“Contemporary architecture has erected innumerable barriers between inside and outside, building and nature. It’s there and we’re here, and that’s that. It wasn’t always so. Access to light and air were starting points and first principles of 19th- and early 20th-century buildings, rights instead of accidents. Until air conditioning and tinted glass made them seem passe, sunscreens, deep windows and natural ventilation were standard features, as though architecture itself were a living, breathing thing.”

“Over the past decades, museums have come to play multiple roles in our lives, but surely none is more important than their ability – in the current period of international turmoil and political realignments – to connect each of us with what other people value culturally and artistically.”

“Hit with cut after cut in city funding, a steep decrease in corporate and foundation giving, and rising security and insurance costs, the city’s cultural leaders are expressing the lowest level of confidence in the future of their industry since Sept. 11. Museums and performing arts organizations are scaling back on visiting exhibitions and productions, and canceling long-term expansion plans altogether.”

Protests over a mural hung in a Milwaukee courthouse have resulted in the art being moved to a much less prominent place. “When the mural – commissioned by Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art as a pictorial history of the Watts area of Los Angeles from the 1965 riots to today – was first hung on the first floor of the courthouse Friday, the work triggered complaints from sheriff’s deputies and other officers, who objected to what they saw as the mural’s anti-law-enforcement images, including the Rodney King case. Court officials raised concerns that the work’s bold images could bias prospective jurors.”