Category: visual

After years of design delays and budgetary haggling, Berlin’s Jewish Museum is finally on schedule to open in September 2001. Originally conceived as a department within a Berlin history museum, “the concept ballooned to meet the space available. With over 4,000 square meters of exhibition space to fill, the existing Berlin collection was dwarfed: bit by bit the Jewish Museum took it on itself to document the history of the Jews in the whole German-speaking world.” – Die Welt (Germany)

Scottish painter Jack Vettriano’s life story reads like Horatio Alger: a miner’s son, he only started painting at 21 and was rejected from art school repeatedly. But now he’s Britain’s most commercially popular artist, with original work selling for up to £40,000 and posters of his work outselling those of  Monet. – The Telegraph (UK)

Al Hirschfeld turns 97 on Wednesday, and he’s still going strong, regularly caricaturing the worlds of stage, dance, music, and film. “I’m enchanted with line, what makes it work, how it communicates recognition to the viewer,” roars the man they dubbed The Line King. “That sounds like a ridiculous, insane kind of thing to devote your life to, but that’s what I’ve done. I find it fascinating, and I’m closer to a definition of it than when I started.” – MSNBC

Jed Perl is down on the new Tate. “People tell me that they love Tate Modern. When I ask for specifics, they don’t seem to be able to say why. The public has such an insatiable hunger for the best things in life – which, needless to say, include museum visits – that they would rather suspend judgment than go away disappointed. There are no more than four dozen paintings or sculptures of consequence dribbled through Tate Modern’s nearly endless galleries, yet somehow this does not matter. The museum has become a funhouse enclosed in a gigantic site-specific sculpture.” – The New Republic

The art of Chechnya is being destroyed in that republic’s struggle with Russia. “Many of the republic’s archaeological and architectural sites are being destroyed since they are located at the centre of hostilities. War is war, and art and archaeology are caught in the crossfire.” – The Art Newspaper

The well-publicized sums paid at auction last week for two Victorian-era paintings (£6.6 million by Lord Andrew Lloyd-Webber for John William Waterhouse’s “Saint Cecilia” and £2.6 million by Australian collector John Schaeffer for Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “Pandora”) may not tell the whole story about what’s really happening in the world of Victorian art sales. In fact, Sotheby’s failed to sell 40% of its British art on the block last week, while Phillips’ unsold lots (of mainly Victorian pictures) totaled 50 percent. – The Telegraph (UK)

• The theme of the seventh annual Venice Biennale of Architecture is “cities: less aesthetics, more ethics.” Not a bad goal, but “it’s a particularly tall order in Venice: the city has been in decline since the 18^th century, and hasn’t been a real, workaday place since the great flood of November 1966, which marked the beginning of a major international effort to conserve [the city]. From then on Venice was pickled in aspic, becoming a tourist ghetto and a place known equally for its aesthetics and its lack of ethics when it came to dealing with the millions of visitors who flood into St Mark’s Square every year.” – The Guardian

• London’s Serpentine Gallery, a “pocket-sized park pavilion” in Kensington Gardens, celebrates its 30^th anniversary tomorrow. Julia Peyton-Jones, the gallery’s director since 1991, is widely credited as the force behind Serpentine’s cutting-edge shows and its growing reputation as Britain’s most successful small gallery. – The Telegraph (UK)

New York fêted graffiti artists with two events this week: an auction of the work of 100 “night writers” and two gallery retrospectives. But, opinions still vary widely over whether graffiti belongs in galleries and museums at all or should be left alone on the streets. – New York Times