Category: visual

PORTRAITS TO THE STARS

In 1969, London’s National Portrait Gallery dropped its requirement that subjects must be dead for 10 years before being portrayed on gallery walls. Ever since, celebrities have been vying for space among the canvases. “With a television star preferred any day over a worthy politician, the gallery has veered towards the voyeurist appeal of a Madame Tussaud’s.” – New York Times

LOSE, LOSE

London’s Millennium Dome has been at the center of controversy since the day it was built. The latest stir: the Dome was given an extra £29 million from the National Lottery this week on condition that its chairman resign. He did, and then MPs protested the government’s earlier promise that no further public funds would be advanced to the Dome. – The Telegraph (UK)

MARKET-MAKERS

  • In 1990, the now-defunct Japanese Itoman Corp. purchase some expensive artwork, “a move that caused huge damage to the trading firm” in part because the prices for the paintings were highly inflated. Last week the paintings were sold at auction and the low prices are probably deflated. The art market in Japan see its highs and lows. – Daily Yomiuri (Japan)

DIRTY LAUNDRY

UK Arts Minster Alan Howarth has selected a panel of experts to examine ways to crack down on Britain’s growing black market for smuggled art and antiquities. An estimated £500 million is laundered every year through the sale of looted artifacts from the Middle East and Africa, all of which can then be legally bought and sold in the UK. – Ananova

WHERE’S THE MODERN IN TATE MODERN?

So the opening of the Tate Modern was the art event of the century. But there are a few problems, aren’t there? “The Tate owns fewer than 700 pieces of international art – not all that many really. It wasn’t created to be a museum of world art at all – in fact, at about the time that the Museum of Modern Art was being established in New York, the Tate was turning up its nose at the work of Gaudier-Brzeska, and didn’t really start buying 20th-century international art until well after the Second World War. The consequence of this is that, although the Tate owns 38 Picassos, it also has enormous gaps in its collection.” – New Statesman

ART JUMBLE

The new new thing is for museums to hang art out of its traditional chronological order. This of course has some critics and curators fuming. Not Thomas Hoving, however: I applaud the jumble-jamble approach. A work of art is an act of magical genius and it essentially doesn’t matter if it was created in the fifth decade of whatever century or is an example of the late middle mature style of whatever artist or school of painting. And it really doesn’t edify the member of the viewing public if that work is isolated within other similar works in time or space. – Artnet

CORPORATE DIVESTMENT

Sara Lee donates 52 works of art to 40 museums. It’s the largest gift to the most museums in US corporate history. ” The 52 works are described as representing ‘a concise survey of European avant-garde painting and sculpture from 1870 to 1960.’ Not much would strike a viewer as ‘avant-garde,’ most of the art having entered the mainstream years ago.”- MSNBC (Newhouse)

WATERING THE SPIRIT OF ART

A pair of “guerrilla artists” walked into the new Tate Modern museum and urinated in Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain.” “The pair claimed that the purpose of their action was to ‘celebrate the spirit of modern art.’ Bemused onlookers in the room applauded, thinking that they had just seen an officially planned performance. The artists claim that after their performance, which lasted about a minute, the Tate closed the room to the public but made no attempt to apprehend them.” – The Guardian