Category: visual

“There is a basic myth of modernism, essential to its ideology, that all great works of art are initially repellent. It is only natural that this should give rise to the suspicion that any art which seems repellent at first is perhaps, after all, daring and provocative. In the past, however, the assimilation of a new style which was originally detested was most often the work not of critics but of the artists themselves.” – New York Review of Books

— the Lord Mayor of Sydney has signed three memorandums that will help ensure a brighter financial future of Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The MCA will now receive nearly $2 million a year in public funding, and no longer has to worry about paying off its debt to the University of Sydney. – Sydney Morning Herald

A Japanese artist has new meaning to the word “detail”; he rents a helicopter, photographs a particular city, and then recreates it on paper with a magnifying glass, drafting pens and calligraphy brushes. Recently he spent 12 hours photographing Manhattan. “From the Hudson River to the East River, every rooftop chicken coop and streetside hot dog stand has surely been accounted for. There are people, too: some 8,000 pinpricks among the 5,000 cars and 230,000 buildings.” – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

While YBAs Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst have pushed traditional artistic boundaries with their unmade beds and pickled animals, the Royal Academy of Arts in London believes in the simple power of the line: drawing. This October, the Academy will sponsor a program in which more than 500 galleries and museums in Britain will offer sessions for adults and children to draw with artists, designers, mathematicians. – Sydney Morning Herald (AP)

The new National Opera house in Beijing, designed by a French architect in the shape of an enormous titanium bubble, has sparked a raging debate in mainland China. Days before authorities are to make the final decision on the project, the China Daily newspaper publishes petitions by more than 150 Chinese intellectuals who believe the futuristic building is all wrong for China. – China Times

Nicholas Serota is smiling. And why not? Serota, director of the Tate Museum, is “one of the handful of culture gurus who have persuaded conservative Britons to cast aside their instinctual suspicion of modern art. Serota has, with Tate Modern, simultaneously catapulted Britain to the forefront of the international contemporary art world, up there with New York’s MOMA and the Pompidou in Paris.” – Los Angeles Times

Canberra’s National Portrait Gallery buys a picture for $5.3 million – the highest price paid for an art work by any Australian public gallery or private collector – for a portrait of Captain James Cook. – The Age (Melbourne)

In preparation for the 2004 Olympics, “teams of archaeologists are restoring and cleaning the 2,500-year-old Parthenon, the Temple of Athena Nike, the walls fortifying the Acropolis, and the Propylaia, the main entrance to the monuments. Projects also include work on the Erechtheion, with its porch of statues of young women known as caryatids.” – Boston Globe

The Japanese embassy in London has been hit by art thieves. “For the past two years, it is thought, a British voluntary librarian allegedly stole about 150 books, selling them via the auction house and to private dealers. The collection had been stored at the embassy by the Japan Society, which promotes relations between Britain and Japan, because it had run out of space and wanted greater security.” – The Telegraph (UK)

Internet auctions have transformed the antique business. But “while the online market has helped to boost antique prices as demand grows, some dealers say online auctions are stripping antiquing of its romance, reducing the thrill of the hunt to a bland point and click. – CNN