Category: visual

The Barnes Collection outside Philadelphia is a great museum yes. But it’s also an extraordinary art school. “There probably isn’t another art school, anywhere, in which students are immersed week after week in one of the world’s great collections. They sit on folding metal chairs in the foundation’s galleries as the instructors teach from celebrated paintings by Renoir, Matisse, Cézanne, Picasso, and dozens of other modern masters. It’s hard to overstate the value of such exposure.”

The city of Zagreb claims to have more museums and galleries per square foot than any other city. “One of the oddities of Zagreb is that although there’s an amazing abundance of museums and galleries, there’s no national art gallery. Instead, several of the leading galleries are named after prominent collectors who left their treasures to the nation.”

Clearly, after the looting of the Iraq National Museum, Mesopotamian studies will never be the same again. In Chicago “at one of the leading global centers for the study of ancient Mesopotamia, the personalities vary but the mood is a mix of anger and mourning, seasoned by the bitterness of personal betrayal. And it’s clear that the recent events in Baghdad already have provoked both internal and external soul-searching about the role of this composite museum-research institute in a harsh new world for near-Eastern scholarship.”

Mesopotamia isn’t just some long-ago land that doesn’t have resonance today. “Mesopotamia was the ‘cradle of civilization’ that gave us the wheel, the 60-minute hour and, probably, the earliest system of writing. And then, too, it is a place in human consciousness – the land of the Garden of Eden and the birthplace of Abraham from which descended such biblical stories as those of Noah, the Tower of Babel and Moses.”

“The five previous editions of the Sharjah biennale had focused mainly on the local and traditional art scene and were aimed at an exclusively local public; this year, however, 117 artists from 25 different countries have been invited and the biennale has taken on an international aspect. It is an ambitious project, entirely the effort of the emirate government led by Sheikh Bin Mohammed al Qasimi. His aim is to show Sharjah as the cultural capital of the United Arab Emirates, and indeed of the entire Persian Gulf.”

Venice’s government has voted to build mobile barriers for the city’s lagoon to protect the city from flooding. The barriers “will consist of 78 hollow, hinged steel flaps, each 18-28 metres high and 20 metres wide, at the three entrances from the sea into the lagoon. In normal conditions they will lie on the sea bed, but when there is the threat of a tide higher than 110 cm above mean sea level, air will force water out of the flaps, which then rise up to hold back the water. The €6 billion (£4.1 billion; $6.4 billion) project, which is expected to be completed by 2011 (to put this cost in proportion: the road works in the centre of Boston have cost $14.6 billion).”

A British MP is trying to close a loophole in the law that would make prosecuting those trying to sell stolen Iraqi art possible. “At the moment if somebody tries to sell an artefact that has been stolen and you can prove who it was stolen from they can be prosecuted for handling stolen goods. But if it can’t be tracked back to the original owner then they can’t be prosecuted. That’s the loophole we’re trying to plug.”

Acknowledging the destruction of hundreds of architecturally important buildings in Chicago over the past decade, Chicago city officials say they’ll find new ways to protect the buildings. “Citing the damaging impact of such cases on Chicago’s physical appearance and cultural legacy, preservationists praised the city’s policy shift but said they were waiting to see the details of whatever programs result.”

Chicago Tribune reporters drive 1000 miles on Chicago streets documenting architecturally important buildings that have been torn down. The reporters counted 704 structures that had been demolished…

Andre Emmerich wonders why museums like Iraq’s National Museum have such a high concentration of available artifacts in one place. Wouldn’t it be better for the preservation of the art if it were spread between many museums and collections? “Contrary to what some believe, trade in ancient objects is not the enemy of preservation. The great contribution the art market makes to this cause is to endow works of art with value. As a practical matter, the objects yielded by excavating tombs are generally quite repetitive within each culture. An obvious solution would be to deaccession the masses of such repetitive minor objects now stored in deplorable conditions.”