Category: visual

“The Swiss architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron has won a competition to build a new museum of 20th-century art in central Berlin with a long, low red-brick design that invited comparisons to a rail station, a barn, a temple and an indoor market.”

“Call it hedging your bets, call it beefing up your odds, call it the architectural equivalent of quite publicly asking two people to prom on the same day: The dual-track proposal is an unusual gambit by any measure. And it suggests that rather than feeling chastened enough by those prior defeats to reassess his sales pitch, to slow down and rethink the plans for the museum in a wholesale way, Lucas is instead growing ever more impatient to get a deal done.”

“The 5.4-magnitude and 5.9-magnitude tremors near Visso in the Marche region follow a 6.2-magnitude earthquake that destroyed the town of Amatrice, 70km to the south, on 24 August, killing at least 295 people. The impact was felt in Rome, Naples and the Veneto coast, according to Italian press reports.”

“The Art of Clara Peeters, which travels from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Antwerp, is a display of 15 still-lifes by one of the few women to work as a professional painter in 17th-century Europe. The Flemish artist is among just 41 women to be represented in the Spanish museum’s permanent collection (compared with more than 5,000 men).”

“The Townley Venus, one of the British Museum’s most important Roman sculptures, was damaged when its thumb was knocked off as catering staff were setting up for an evening event last December.”

Chiara Appendino, a member of the populiist Five Star Movement who took office this summer, demaded the resignation of Fondazione Torino Musei president Patrizia Asproni “after it was revealed that a major sponsor of a proposed Edouard Manet exhibition was backing out of a plan to host the show in Turin” – a show that Appendino herself had reportedly opposed.

“The expansion, which will double the size of the museum to a total of 102,000 square feet — including galleries, administrative areas and other public spaces — will finally allow MCASD to show its collection in a permanent way. (Currently the museum has only 10,000 square feet of gallery space, which allows for the display of only one exhibition at a time.)”

“We live in an era when much of what you read about are mega-monster galleries that are very rich and powerful, with tons of money and satellites. But that’s really only 5 percent of the market. The vast majority of galleries are small single- or double-venue operations that are looking for creative ways to extend themselves into the community without feeling the need to engulf and devour the world.”

“Since Robert Hughes wrote his book over 20 years ago, the culture of complaint has become ever more prevalent. Complaining has become an art form and a way of life. Much of contemporary art (as represented on the other floors of Tate Modern’s new extension) is a complaint about greedy corporations and the inhumanity men show to men – or, more often, to women. And it invites us to join in. Tate Exchange touts itself as ‘a space for everyone to collaborate, test ideas and discover new perspectives on life, through art’. That is, it’s a space for complaining. The corrosive effect of turning complaining into an artistic endeavour is becoming clear.”

“From at least the 16th century until as late as the early 1900s, a pigment made from mummified human remains appeared on the palettes of European artists … Painters prized ‘mummy brown’ for its rich, transparent shade. As a result, an unknown number of ancient Egyptians are spending their afterlife on art canvases, unwittingly admired in museum galleries around the world.”