Category: visual

Birmingham, England’s central library is only 30 years old. It has been controversial – seen either as part of an axis of architectural evil, along with the city’s Rotunda and New Street station, or as a bold brutalist design. Prince Charles described it as “looking like a place where books are incinerated”. Now it is to be torn down for a new library. But some worry that “although fashions of the 1970s have been reassessed and mined for information several times over, buildings of this period are still very little understood; if the library is demolished, Birmingham will lose a great building before its importance has been recognised.”

A guard at New York’s Riker’s Island jail has implicated himself in the theft of a Salvador Dali sketch from the facility. “The officer told authorities Saturday’s theft was concocted as a get-rich-quick scheme, with participants hoping to cash in on the sketch by selling it on the black market for $500,000. But the painting was discovered missing far sooner than they hoped because the officers opted to keep it in its frame and put a replica sketched by one of the guards back with another frame.”

Paris museums are moving art in their storerooms to a location outside the city for fear of floods. The massive transport of 100,000 artworks is disrupting museums. “The Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre, are sited right on the banks of the river, which snakes through Paris in a series of grand curves. Many others are also having to evacuate their stores: the Musée des Arts Decoratifs, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts and the Orangerie. The current urgency is particularly unfortunate given that huge underground galleries and stores were built under the Louvre as recently as the 1980s as part of I.M.Pei’s Grand Louvre project. At the time no one was worried about floods.”

The San Francisco Asian Art Museum is one of the largest in the Western Hemisphere devoted to Asian art. Next week the museum reopens in a $160 million new home. “The museum’s move to downtown will allow it to display nearly 2,500 works from its renowned collection, more than double what it could show in its old Golden Gate Park location, in a lavishly renovated landmark that is a destination on its own.”

Kenneth Baker weighs in on art repatriation issues: “The furor over Nazi looting has touched off a transnational frenzy of new and renewed demands for repatriation of artworks stolen, liquidated or otherwise lost during wartime or colonial occupation. These range from Greece’s perennial demands for Britain’s return of the Parthenon ‘Elgin marbles’ to Korean demands for the return of artifacts stolen by Japan during the Second World War and earlier. Reflecting on the weight of such claims, it is worth remembering that Hitler’s cultural officers frequently looted art treasures on the pretext of repatriating them in the aftermath of the wars of centuries past.”

Should museums be allowed to alter works of art in their care to create other works of art? James Fenton protests. “Tate ‘conservators’ have conspired with the exploding-shed-monger and brass-instrument-crusher, Cornelia Parker, to wrap Rodin’s marble group, ‘The Kiss’, in a mile of string. They should not have done this. It should be a principle of conservation that nothing unnecessary is done to an original work of art in a public collection, and I don’t care what the ‘conservators’ say about the care they took in executing this banal intervention. They wouldn’t have dared do this to Brancusi. They shouldn’t have done this to Rodin.”

Police say they’re close to solving the theft of a Salvador Dali painting from New York’s Riker’s Island jail. The penal institution has enlisted the help of the artworl’d stolen art resources, putting it in the company of collectors and museums. “In terms of dollar value, art crime stands out among illicit industries, ranked just below narcotics and the illegal arms trade. Experts estimate that worldwide losses range from $2 billion to $6 billion a year.”

Scotland’s new parliament building has been awash in controversy – almost all of it about the enormous cost. But this is missing the point, writes Duncan Macmillan. “We seem unable to lift our eyes from the cost of the building itself to see what we are getting for our money. But sheathed in scaffolding and polythene sheeting, our parliament is a chrysalis. In a month or two a marvellous butterfly is going to emerge to astonish us all. Or maybe not a butterfly. Really, it is a flower.”

Officials are wondering what to do with a controversial review of the National Museum of Australia. One thing they’re not doing so far is making the findings public. “The review was set up against a background of debate about the presentation of indigenous history, which has pitted the celebratory ‘three cheers’ view of the impact of white settlement against the black-armband view so disapproved of by the Prime Minister, John Howard. It has been criticised by several historians as politically driven, a motive denied by the council’s chairman.”

“The Washington skyline is due for an exhilarating lift in three years or so, when a spectacular memorial honoring men and women of the U.S. Air Force rises on a hill just west of the Pentagon. Unveiled yesterday, the memorial design by architect James Ingo Freed appropriately is a soaring thing, an airy triumvirate of stainless steel pylons ascending in gentle arcs into the Virginia sky. The highest of the spires will ascend 270 feet above a granite-paved plateau on a promontory overlooking the Pentagon and monumental Washington. A second arc comes in at 230 feet, and the third tops off at just above 200.”