Category: visual

Madame Chiang Kai-shek was known for her shrewdness, imperious style and the power she wielded in her late husband’s Nationalist Chinese regime. She’s now 103 years old, and was, as it turns out, a pretty good painter in the traditional Chinese style. A show of 20th Century Chinese artists at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum includes a collection of her art. – San Francisco Chronicle

Eight years ago Ireland’s Arthouse multimedia center was set up to be “one of the gleaming flagships of artistic innovation” in Ireland. But lack of funding, confusion over what it should be and a revolving door of leadership – three directors already – have pretty much everyone confused about what multimedia means. – Irish Times

Youngstown, Ohio’s Beecher Center, long a friend to American painting, takes a plunge on technology with a new wing to celebrate the digital artistic side. – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

After 27 years at the banking giant Citicorp/Citibank, ending up as vice chairman and chairman of the executive committee and nine years as the second-in-charge at Fannie Mae, America’s largest investor in home mortgages Laurence Small took over the top job at the Smithsonian this week. For the Smithsonian’s 6,000 employees, a “hard-knuckled business type is a shift from the long line of scientists and scholars.” – Washington Post

London’s TAG Sales, founded five years ago, “make lips curl in the upper echelons of the art market, but they have found their niche. They are part of a growing market in affordable art aimed at people with a limited knowledge of art and even less confidence about buying it from traditional galleries, but who have vacant wall space and disposable income.” – The Telegraph (UK)

A writer in the New York Times recently dated the contemporary period in art as beginning in 1970, writes Hilton Kramer. Oh really? And just how are we defining “contemporary?” – New York Observer

A $150 million retrofit of San Francisco’s old public library for a museum of Asian art is the Bay Area’s most ambitious museum reaction to its earthquake problem. – San Francisco Chronicle

• St. Louis Museum ponders a quake of its own. – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

• The Milwaukee Art Museum is building a new landmark bridge designed by Santiago Calatrava designed to boost the museum’s profile. With a length of 231 feet, topped by a 192-foot tower, the free-floating span is said to be an engineering feat of immense proportions. – Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

“Joining a debate as old as the reunification of Germany itself, the President of the Berlin Chamber of Architects, has called on the city to abandon “reactionary” plans to rebuild the Emperors’ Palace on Unter den Linden and instead build a future-oriented and community-friendly structure. Rebuilding the Stadtschloss, the Hohenzollern palace blown up by the East German government in 1950, would, he said, produce a fake Disney-esque facade that might become a tourist destination but would leave a hollow heart in the city.” – Die Welt

Was Salvador Dali a great surrealist painter and draftsman or merely a buffoonish public charlatan and poseur? A new 60-painting show at Connecticut’s Wadsworth Atheneum begs the question. – Hartford Courant