Tag: 01.13.05

Zaha Hadid has been chosen to design the home of the Architecture Foundation in London. “On a site close to Tate Modern in south London, Hadid’s riveting sense of occasion has found appropriate fulfilment, as the winner of a competition staged to give a home to the Architectural Foundation.”

Frankfurt sanitation workers mistakenly removed and destroyed some yellow plastic sheets on the street that were part of an art installation. “Thirty of the dustmen are now being sent to modern art classes to try to ensure that the same mistake never happens again. The head of Frankfurt’s sanitation department, Peter Postleb, took responsibility for the destruction of the sculpture, saying that confusing the plastic sheets with rubbish was an easy mistake to make. He thought they were abandoned building materials.”

Evidence suggests that celebrated art critic John Ruskin didn’t burn a stack of Turner’s work, as he claimed. “Ruskin appears to have been tried and convicted by the standard version of his involvement with the Turner bequest, which characterizes him as the man who destroyed any surviving evidence of his hero’s sex life. Although the bonfire incident has passed into the popular imagination as one of the defining landmarks of Victorian censorship, what evidence there is to support this version of events is surprisingly slight.”

The new MoMA is so much larger, it has reinvented itself. But this very ambitious museum has a problem. “If it continues adventurously to acquire new works, it will soon run out of space —as, in fact, it already has. Yet no other American museum is so generously committed and dedicated to continuing to present international developments in contemporary art. It is clear that selling off valuable parts of the basic collection to make room for novelties, however promising or prestigious, is a form of vandalism. As it now stands, the greater part of the collection should, by moral right, be accorded public landmark status.”