Category: visual

The Museum of Modern Art opens a blockbuster “Matisse Picasso” show in a couple of weeks. But MoMA is in a much smaller space (in Queens)than its longtime Manhattan home. Crowds “promise to be larger than anything the site has yet encountered, raising inevitable questions about how visitors will move through the building without clogging it and whether they will have room to appreciate the nearly 140 works by two of the 20th century’s masters.”

The World Trade Center project is about more than big buildings. “The process of thinking about this unique site expanded into an exercise in imagining a new future for the skyscraper in an increasingly dense and urbanized world. In a number of proposals, the towers are interconnected rather than autonomous, so that they work horizontally as well as vertically. In effect, they create another ground plane to accommodate the kinds of public spaces historically limited to the street: parks, gardens and cultural facilities. The nine diverse schemes all conceive of urban life as a vertical proposition – cities in the sky.”

A new eco-friendly energy-efficient way of building housing in Britain makes minimal impact on the environment. It’s oh-so-good for you. Yet it’s the style and aesthetics that win buyers. “It’s ingenious: tapping into the power of the raw consumer, making eco-homes as easy to buy as an organic swede. Now, that’s how real revolutions start, you see. By playing capitalism at its own game. By stealth.”

Was modern art used as a torture device in the Spanish Civil War? “A Spanish art historian has uncovered what was alleged to be the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture, with the discovery that mind-bending prison cells were built by anarchist artists 65 years ago during the country’s bloody civil war. Bauhaus artists such as Kandinsky, Klee and Itten, as well as the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel and his friend Salvador Dali, were said to be the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centres built in Barcelona and elsewhere.”

Seattle Times reporters buy art purported to be Chinese antiques hundreds of years old from a local gallery. Turns out the art isn’t hundreds of years old – it’s only a few years old, practically new. “The pieces sold by Thesaurus Fine Arts are a trickle in the flood — but notable in that, unlike many fakes, they are purportedly backed by scientific evaluation. Experts say they know of no other art dealer in the United States that makes such sweeping claims on obviously phony pieces.”

Hopes were sky high back in 1997 for the new Scottish Parliament building “designed by the Catalan architect Enric Miralles as ‘the visual embodiment of exciting constitutional change’. How those hopes have turned to ashes. The Parliament, once estimated to cost between £10 and £40 million and scheduled to open last December, is now expected to come in at £338.1 million. Completion is not expected before November.” It’s all a big mess – so what happened?

A former museum guard defaced a famous painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Washington crossing the Delaware by glueing a picture of the World Trade Center’s twin towers to the bottom of the famous Revolutionary War scene last weekend. The painting was undamages and has been restored.

Japan’s art museums are facing a serious cash crunch. As the economy has stalled, money for art has become scarce. “In the profligate 1980s, Japanese businessmen lavished money on art, and when in 1987 the Yasuda Insurance Co bought Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers for more than US$36 million the purchase rocked the global art market. Those days are long gone.”

Why, after 24 years of rejecting the proposal, did New York City agree to let Christo do his “Gates” project in New York’s Central Park? “People don’t realise the reason for the rejection the first time was that the park was in deplorable condition. It was neglected and so worn out that most of us thought—whatever the merits of the project—the park just couldn’t stand it. Since then, the Central Park Conservancy has been established and now the park is in wonderful shape. The proposal has been scaled down and at this scale I think it can work and will be most beautiful.”

Italy will return a fragment of the Parthenon to Greece as a “gesture of goodwill”. “The fragment is part of the statue of Peitho, the daughter of Mercury and Venus, which once adorned the eastern side of the Parthenon. A 14-by-13.6- inch piece of marble, it depicts the goddess’s foot and a portion of her tunic. The frieze was regularly purchased by the museum between 1818 and 1820 from the widow of Robert Fagan, the British consul for Sicily and Malta” and has nothing to do with the Elgin Marbles.