Category: visual

The Artists on Film Trust has collected rare films of famous artists at work. The collection “constitutes a virtually unknown body of art historical sources. These films are certainly a fascinating historical source for the techniques of artists.”

Neil MacGregor has been director of the British Museum since last August. He says the museum’s relationship with the government is better. And that the museum is thinking on new ways of displaying its collections. “It is clearly possible to construct many different narratives. One of the questions is where the universal story should begin: where do you site prehistory? Do you then want visitors to move from prehistory into Mesopotamia? Or, as much of our material is British, do you want to start the sequence of British archaeological galleries? Or do you want to go on to the hunting societies of North America?”

London is contemplating building Europe’s tallest building. It’s designed by Renzo Piano, and the design has been greeted positively. But many are reluctant to see the city bust out of its current gracious skyline. “London is under siege from tall buildings and tall building proposals. We do feel a bit conflicted opposing something so wonderful. Piano’s design is exciting. It’s just the wrong scale in the wrong place.”

Sarah Milroy goes looking for what’s new in Canadian art across the country. “Art schools in Canada pump out more than 23,000 graduates a year, and a zippy, techno-friendly bunch they are too. After a few days on the trail, though, I started to realize that most of the best artists I spoke to, or heard about, shared a common tendency: an interest in the disposable, the futile, the abject, the slightly unravelled.”

The founder of the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow has little use for modern art. “I have met plenty of people who have told me that I ought to like modern art. There is some place for ‘ought’ in life, but none at all in art; art is a gift, not a duty. A benighted view of art has a stranglehold on the few who choose what little art we are aloud to see. And the public acquiesce, because what else can they compare it with? It is one of the most pernicious myths of modern art that we have discovered the great art of our age when, in fact, we have hardly begun to look for it.”

“The Venetian Resort said yesterday it is closing its Guggenheim Museum, ending a high-profile commercial effort to deliver culture to the gambling masses. The museum’s only show featured the history of the motorcycle as art.”

Reports of what’s missing from Iraq’s National Museum after looters got done have been contradictory. “The number of items stolen during and after the war from one of the world’s premier collections of early-civilization antiquities appears now to be much smaller than first suspected. Thousands of pieces, however, are missing. Although many of the thefts are being attributed to looters, some appear almost certainly to be the work either of insiders or experts.”

Concerned archeologists, scholars, conservators and arts administrators in the West have been meeting in recent weeks to try to find ways to help Baghdad’s National Museum, which was looted in April. There still isn’t enough information about losses at the museum to take definitive definitive action, but “we are also very concerned that the inventory of the museum’s collection be done by individuals with academic and museum qualifications, not the military, and that guards and other people who worked in the museums be rehired.”

The Brooklyn Museum is closing for two weeks this summer to save money. “Closing the Brooklyn Museum from Aug. 4 through Aug. 19 will save $250,000, said Robert S. Rubin, chairman of the museum. The nearly 300 union and nonunion employees will rotate shifts for the two weeks so that everyone will be on furlough for at least a week, he said.”

Americans in Iraq have located much of the art thought to have been looted from Iraq’s National Museum. “The investigators located the vaults in Baghdad over the last week, including five within the museum complex, and forced them open, revealing hundreds of artifacts that had apparently been stored away to protect them from being damaged in an American assault. The finds included ancient jewelry, pottery and sarcophaguses, officials said. The discovery of so many valuable artifacts would support the view of Iraqi museum officials and American investigators who have said that while many irreplaceable antiquities were looted from the museum during the fall of Baghdad last month, the losses were less severe than thought.”