Category: visual

If ever there were a figure who proves that architecture is as much about process as end result, Grant Mudford is it. The photographer specializes in taking pictures of buildings in progress, and claims that the half-finished structures he captures are as much art as the finished buildings themselves. “I see buildings that are accepted as being great works of architecture, and I’ve always experienced them through photographs before I’ve actually experienced them firsthand… But there’s a whole bunch of mediocre works of architecture that look great in photographs, a lot more interesting than they really are.”

“In the era of customized consumer capitalism, distinction is mass-produced, and connoisseurship has been democratized. The wide availability of a variety of beautiful, unusual things – at Pottery Barn, on eBay, at stores that turn the junk of earlier eras into today’s collectibles – increases the pressure, the sense of responsibility, that attends every purchase. Like the food revolution, the design revolution is built on the lovely paradox that what is special should be available for everyone’s enjoyment and that good taste can at last shed its residue of invidious social differences. Which means that indifference is unacceptable.”

Irina Antonova has been director of the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow for 41 years. “Such longevity would be remarkable anywhere — even in the United States Senate — but Russia is a particular case. Mrs. Antonova’s career at the Pushkin, which began one month before the end of World War II, has survived Stalinism, democracy and everything in between, including unresolved disputes over looted and lost art.”

The “Alternative Turner Prize” is a plea “for a wider and more generous choice of art and artists” than is recognized by the Turner Prize. This year’s shortlist of eight has three painters, two internet artists, a sculptor, a photographer and a graffiti artist. It will be judged by a panel of critics drawn from conceptualist and traditional schools. Organizers “insist it is not an anti-Turner event, and is at great pains to distance itself from the Stuckists, who protest outside the Turner Prize ceremony every year.”

“According to one UNESCO estimate, Italy is the cultural repository of more than two-thirds of western civilisation. But the state spends little on culture—just 0.18% of GDP—and an absence of tax breaks for donations gives the private sector little incentive to help.” So the way Italy’s cultural assets are run is apalling. Could the private sector do a better job? The country’s Prime Minister says yes…

BritArt is hot, and the Britartists are getting wealthy. So they’re building. Studios. Homes. Architecture that expresses their sensibilities. Judging by their projects, “this is the most affluent generation of British artists since millionaire Royal Academicians took over Holland Park and Chelsea a century and a half ago.”

When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus School in the 1930s, Mies van der Rohe chose to stay. He believed, he said, in “something more noble than politics, the ruthless pursuit of the perfect modern building, the true heir, he thought, to Greek temples and gothic cathedrals – buildings constructed on earth in order to escape it. These were cathedrals for the new religion, commerce and industry – factories, office blocks, skyscrapers and apartment towers, the modern urban landscape, whose architecture had yet to be invented. The form lay out there for him to discover.”

Art for the walls of Denver’s main performing arts complex is put up on a first-come-first-served basis. Artists sign up and wait until their turn comes up. But the art is democratic, it’s almost nearly always bad, writes Kyle MacMillan. “It is only logical that what is shown on the walls of the Boettcher and Buell should be of the same caliber as the dance, music and theater presented on the stages of the two halls. Anything less demeans the performers who appear there, and it reflects badly on an otherwise vibrant local art scene and the city at large.”

The Austrian court – long criticized for not doing more to ensure the recovery of artwork looted by the Nazis – has taken the remarkable step of seizing an Egon Schiele painting valued between €45,000-60,000 which was to have been sold at auction. “The Vienna seizure is preliminary to possible private action to recover the painting. Although Austrian law favours owners who in ‘good faith’ have acquired stolen objects, a lawsuit nonetheless will apparently take place.”

Dotcom pioneer Halsey Minor bought millions of dollars worth of paintings at the top of the market. Now he has another venture to fund, and he’s selling off his art. “Mr. Minor stands to lose about $13 million on the Christie’s sale alone, scheduled for Thursday. And experts speculate that he has already lost $10 million on paintings the Gerald Peters Gallery recently sold privately, including works by Hopper and Hartley.”