Category: visual

Three Los Angeles artists are “using military GPS technology to create a new kind of art form – the urban story space.” They’ve staked out a patch of land in the city and “visitors to the site are given headphones, a handheld global positioning system (GPS) device, and a tablet PC with special software to help guide them around the industrial landscape, which was a vital area during the early to mid-20th century.The equipment works much like the headphones with wands that museums supply visitors for tours, but here, the GPS shows people the ‘hot spots’ of information on a digital map. When visitors stand near a hot spot, the software triggers a story about that site.”

“When the French Parliament threw open the auction business to competition in 2001, ending a 500-year government monopoly, it seemed certain that the big winners would be Sotheby’s and Christie’s. The two giants dominate the global market, with more than $2 billion in annual sales each, and have been eager to establish a firm foothold in France. Yet to everyone’s surprise, it’s private local dealers such as CalmelsCohen, which was founded only last year, that are grabbing the lion’s share of the spoils. And investors betting on the liberalization of the $600 million French market for fine arts are lining up to back these upstarts.”

“In the past 18 months, museums’ insurance rates have shot up as much as 50 percent, and in New York, where museums borrowing works from abroad have had to buy costly terrorism coverage, they’ve doubled. At the same time, the price of shipping art is rising, in part because of higher air freight costs and the increased demands of lenders reluctant to let their art travel at a time of global unrest… Those higher costs, coming at a time of budget cuts and drops in revenue, are causing some museums to scale back the number of big touring exhibitions they present and the shows they create with borrowed works.”

“Though New Yorkers have publicly, sometimes acrimoniously, debated how to build memorials to 9/11, people in communities from Fawnskin, Calif., to Franklin, N.J., quietly have been getting to work. Across the nation, they have incorporated World Trade Center steel into more than 250 tributes to the dead. Girders carefully stacked like Lincoln Logs have become the centerpieces of municipal gardens. Church bell towers display an incongruous mix of battered metal and smooth stone. Civic reflecting pools shimmer with wavy images of cold, hard steel.”

“Missing for nearly 140 years, a painting of the Yosemite Valley by the widely admired landscapist Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902) has been found and put on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington — along with two curious copies that at first glance seem indistinguishable from the original.” One of the copies is a chromolithographic print of the original, albeit a high-quality one. The other is an actual hand copy by an anonymous New York art student. The Corcoran doesn’t go out of its way to point out which painting is the genuine article, but doesn’t completely hide it either.

The new Saatchi Gallery is provoking discussion of what all that art of the 90s meant. “In the past 10 years, as never before, art has been seeking attention, getting itself noticed, making it big. Once it was an elevated but hardly obtrusive feature of the landscape, dropping the occasional branch in the public road (those bricks, etc). But since the early 1990s art has arrived with a crash, become one of the fallen trees that block our streets, suddenly massive and unavoidable. Yes, it may have come down in the world a little. But heck, look at the visibility. We all know the names carved in the bark. Damien Hirst. Young British Artists. Sensation. The Turner prize. Tracey Emin. Tate Modern. Serota. Saatchi. What happened? What caused this spectacular arrival, that turned art into one of those things that are understood to be newsworthy with no further explanation, like pop, sport, soaps, supermodels?”

Those hoping Iraq’s archaeological treasures won’t be destroyed By the American invasion will be disappointed. “There are so many archaeological sites in Iraq that it’s like a dart game – wherever you throw a dart, you’ll hit a site. Frankly, at this point, wherever the war’s soldiers move, they will be doing damage to archaeological terrain.”

From the Acropolis to the Bamiyan Buddhas – the list of cultural wonders destroyed by war is a long one…

This year’s Beck’s Futures show opening Friday at London’s ICA has taken a turn for the radical, writes Andrew Renton. “Just when the four-year-old award appeared to have been bedding in as the alternative Turner, it has reinvented itself with a streamlined short list of artists who are hardly visible outside the art world and hard to define within it…”

“This year’s Beck’s Futures, a sort of crazy teenage Turner Prize for grown-ups, is so angrily anti-artworld that most of the artists shortlisted didn’t bother taking any actual art to the exhibition space.”