Category: visual

This month Venice has recorded its third-worst flood since 1900, endangering the city’s artwork and buildings. The city wants to work on building new barriers to keep the water out but environmentalists oppose the idea. – The Art Newspaper

• WHY NO BARRIERS? There is a fear that by closing them for 100-300 hours a year—and there are some 8,600 hours in a year—it would affect the exchange of water between the sea and the lagoon, and that the lagoon would become polluted. As the Special Law for Venice says that the lagoon is inseparable from the historic city, it is not possible to act on one part rather than the whole. – The Art Newspaper

The controversy that plagued the British Museum every step of its redesign – including the public outcry over its use of the wrong kind of stone in its new $97 million portico – seems to have finally subsided. “To visitors to the Great Court, this storm in a wine goblet will mean little if anything. In 10 years, few will know or care what all the fuss was for. What they will know, instead, is one of the most extraordinary covered squares to be found in any city, ancient or modern. – The Guardian

• The US’s first women’s museum opened in Dallas last month, but visitors are unlikely to walk away with a broad knowledge of women’s accomplishments, artistic or otherwise. “[The Women’s Museum] is an institution as notable for what it omits as what it contains, a watery survey of female accomplishment that for the most part glosses over the conditions – i.e., a couple of centuries of sexual inequality and its attendant ills – that make such an institution necessary in the first place.” – Salon

Melbourne’s new $290 million museum, which opened last month, has upset its neighbors. “They appear to be desperately reacting to their own financial difficulties by panicking into holding activities which will not only degrade the Museum of Victoria but also degrade the Carlton area and alienate the residents.” – Financial Review

Just a few years ago the internet was being touted as likely to revolutionize the world of art sales. Its success hasn’t been nearly so pervasive, but “even the skeptics did not predict the problems that have since assailed art and antiques online sites. The weakest have closed, some are desperately in need of more cash from increasingly skeptical venture capitalists, others have seen their share prices plunge and even Sotheby’s has been forced to amalgamate its two sites.” – The Telegraph (UK)

What is it about the Turner Prize? “What gets up my nose most about the Turner is the downright dishonest way in which the whole exercise is presented as rigorous and objective. It would like to compare itself to the Booker, but unlike the book world, in which ultimately the public can have its say by either buying or not buying books, the much smaller art world is maintained largely by the patronage of art institutions and major collectors.” – The Independent (UK) 

The Museum of Modern Art’s new temporary digs outside Manhattan promise to change the context of the art and the experience of seeing it. – New York Times

“His architecture is bracing and unsettling and even though nothing he has done yet has had the same popular impact as Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim, he is clearly going to be the next big thing.” – The Observer (UK)

Scholars have argued for years over the unusual misshapen appearance of the left breast of Michelangelo’s marble statue ‘Night’. Experts have agreed that its unusual appearance is intentional and not due to an error but art historians and plastic surgeons have argued that it reflects the artist’s supposed lack of interest in, or unfamiliarity with, the nude female figure. Now, experts propose that Michelangelo deliberately set out to portray a woman with breast cancer.” – The Independent (UK)

It’s become fashionable to deride the big money in art. “But what’s so special about art? People seldom climb into pulpits to lament that commodity broking, or insurance, or even interior decoration has become ‘too money orientated’. Why is it that art alone is polluted by the appearance of cash in more than moderate quantities? And what, for that matter, is so very awful about largish rewards being handed out even for ‘silly’ works of art? More tragic things happen in the world than foolish artists getting undeservedly enriched.” – The Telegraph (UK)