Category: visual

Many artists spend a lot of time agonizing over how their work will be framed. But frames get no respect. “The market in images has no room for frames. Magazines, newspapers, exhibition catalogues and art books act as if they don’t exist, cropping them out of reproductions even when the painters saw them as integral parts of their work.”

In the first year since admission charges at major British museums were dropped, attendance has soared. “The most dramatic increase has been at the V&A, which has seen a 111% increase, helped by the opening of its beautiful £31m British galleries. The effect at the other museums in South Kensington, west London, where a family visit would have cost around £30 in charging days, has been almost as spectacular. Numbers at the Science Museum and Natural History Museum have gone up 100% and 83% respectively.”

What’s the next big thing in British art? “Prepare yourself to be truly shocked. For the next big thing in modern British art is the New Gentleness. And it involves lots of that supposedly endangered species, the painter. Massed watercolourists are not about to storm Tate Britain and ransack the Turner prize show, but something is stirring, though no one dares to use the word movement.”

Christine Temin believes American museums need help. “Museums in this country desperately need not just financial help but help in defining their mission, their audience, their ethics. Over the past couple of decades they’ve made considerable noise about trading elitism for accessibility, and that’s certainly backed up by, among other things, a steep increase in education programs, some more effective than others. But $20 tickets to special exhibitions and $15 general admission – the current fees at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston – don’t exactly make the museum more accessible.”

“The Canadian Museum of Civilization is preparing to return dozens — perhaps hundreds — of bones taken from native burial grounds to the Algonquin people whose ancestors inhabited the Ottawa area before white settlers arrived in the 19th century and began unearthing Indian graves. The proposed ‘repatriation’ of human remains… follows a series of [Ottawa] Citizen stories earlier this year revealing that a communal cemetery holding about 20 aboriginal skeletons was dug up 160 years ago on a point of land in Gatineau now occupied by the museum itself.”

In a three-paragraph e-mail message, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation announced that it had withdrawn its proposal to build a polymorphous, 400-foot-tall building designed by Frank Gehry on Piers 9, 13 and 14, south of the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan.” The plan would have cost $950 million, and the museum admits that was an unrealistic goal.

“Archivists at the British Museum are scratching their heads after learning that the biggest hoard of Roman treasure ever found in Britain comprised 35 pieces – not 34, as has been believed for the past 60 years – and that the goblet that is missing could be worth more than £1 million.” The discovery was made when a 94-year-old man who had worked on cleaning one of the goblets came to visit the museum and discovered it was missing.

Why do corporations collect art? “Apart from the profits and tax relief such sales and donations generate for companies, they also produce what social theorist Pierre Bourdieu has called “cultural capital,” the prestige and importance that come with a reputation for high-mindedness and civic responsibility. Cultural capital is especially important for companies that make things that can hurt people, such as tobacco and alcohol. It’s no accident Philip Morris and Seagram have two of the most respected corporate art collections.”

Los Angeles issued 1,211 demolition permits in 2001. This ‘erase-atecture,’ as some architectural historians call it, gives builders room to press forward with their perpetual reinvention of the city, and it often protects the public from unsafe structures. But nobody knows just how much valuable history the wrecking balls obliterate each year, because in most cases, nobody’s keeping track. About 85% of the city’s standing structures have never been surveyed for historic or cultural significance.

Surrealist artist Andre Breton’s collection of art – to be sold next year – provides “the most complete history of the evolution of an iconoclastic group which opposed all forms of moral and social convention and replaced them by the ‘values of dreams, instinct, desire and revolt’.” The 400 paintings, 1,500 photographs and 3,500 documents are an invaluable record. The Surrealists “1924 manifesto laid the ground for some of Europe’s most devastating artistic quarrels, often turning on a love-hate relationship with Marxism, including Breton’s falling out with the communist poet Louis Aragon.”