Roman Discovery

A recently discovered mysterious “winged” structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.

Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room.

“Generally speaking, [during] the Roman Empire people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms,” said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.

The winged shape of the building appears to be unique in the Roman Empire, with no other example known. “It’s very unusual to find a building like this where you have no known parallels for it,” Bowden told LiveScience. “What they were trying to achieve by using this design is really very difficult to say.”

Live Science

Hockney, Still Going Strong

David Hockney’s Bigger Picture exhibition includes landscapes of the same spots painted through different seasons. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

The biggest ever UK exhibition of landscape paintings by a living British artist opens this weekend, with the Royal Academy of Arts bracing itself for large numbers wishing to view David Hockney’s collection of his pictures of the Yorkshire countryside near his home in Bridlington.

The 150 works, many of them gigantic and most of them painted in the past five years, fill an entire exhibition floor at the RA’s Piccadilly headquarters in central London.

The much-hyped exhibition, A Bigger Picture, runs from this Saturday until 9 April. It will subsequently tour to Bilbao, Spain, this summer and Cologne, Germany, next autumn.

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Stephen Bates
Guardian

The New Gardner

The Renzo Piano-designed wing stands a respectful distance behind the Venetian palazzo-style museum

In her will Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) stipulated that her museum, which she founded in 1903 and where she idiosyncratically installed her collection of fine and decorative art, remain largely unaltered. A copper-clad, four-storey-high building where a coach house formerly stood was never part of her vision, but this 70,000 sq. ft extension has been added to the museum that bears her name. Due to open on 19 January, the wing has been designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Italian architect Renzo Piano and has cost $118m…

“For the first time we will have a real exhibition space to focus on certain objects in our collection,” says Oliver Tostmann, the museum’s research fellow, who is due to become the collection’s curator in April. He plans to select one or two objects from the collection each year and show them alongside objects from other institutions in the new space. The opening exhibitions will commemorate the 20th anniversary of the museum’s artist-in-residence programme.

Gardner was able to build a museum for her growing art collection when she inherited $2.1m from her father in 1891. He made his wealth in the Irish linen trade and later in mining investments. Gardner’s peers—and rivals for work by Titian, Botticelli and Michelangelo—included the likes of JP Morgan, Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Mellon, or the “squillionaires”, as she called them. “I’ve got the picture habit. It’s as bad as the whisky habit,” she confessed in 1896.

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Erica Cooke
The Art Newspaper

Wheeler Acknowledged, At Last

Doug Wheeler’s installation “DW 68 VEN MCASD 11” (1968-2011), in San Diego. Photo: Doug Gates/Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

The artist Doug Wheeler tells two stories, both having to do with light, that go a long way toward explaining why he is so revered by many fellow artists — as a visionary and a relentlessly stubborn perfectionist — and also why his work has been seen by so few American artgoers over the last few decades, particularly those in New York.

The first story takes place at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, where several years ago Mr. Wheeler created a complex installation he calls an “infinity environment,” featuring a light-saturated, all-white, rounded room with no corners or sharp angles, rendering viewers unable to fix their eyes on any surface. It invokes an experience of light itself as an almost tactile presence. As Mr. Wheeler continued to tweak the piece, a small boy walked up to the room and hesitated before entering, putting his hands in front of him because his senses told him that the square entrance was a wall, not simply a wall of light flooding his vision.

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Randy Kennedy
New York Times

Pleasure!

Fine wine … detail of Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1523-24). Photograph: Corbis

Walter Pater was one of the most honest critics to ever have lived. In his book The Renaissance, this Victorian scholar says something subtly disturbing to many people who love the arts. The purpose of criticism, he argues, is to identity and understand the particular types of pleasure that works of art can give us.

Pleasure! This is something few critics have ever been prepared to be so open about. Art, in a philistine world, is forever fighting its corner. Arts administrators resisting cuts feel obliged to insist on the deeper value of art, its use to society, its ennobling purposes. Artists themselves, when interviewed, also want to come across as serious people doing something of immense political and cultural importance. Only rarely does an artist reject the idea of social and spiritual purpose – as Bob Dylan does in the 1967 film Don’t Look Back, when he sneers at journalists asking him to explain his “message”.

Pater was art’s bravest whistleblower. He said frankly that works of art exist to give us pleasure, just like wines, or divans, or tobacco, or whatever else filled the archetypal Victorian aesthete’s boudoir.

It’s time for me to come clean, too. The reason I write about art is because it gives me so much pleasure. I delight in art. It is a drink, a feast. And this is the true reason why, much of the time, I choose to stress the great paintings and sculptures of history. This isn’t some cliched juxtaposing of figurative art and conceptualism – just a recognition that if you are looking at and writing about art every day you may as well explore the headiest flavours, the richest recipes. If you were a professional food critic, would you want to write about crisps – or haute cuisine? Great paintings that have stood the trust of time are like wines that have matured for centuries.

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Jonathan Jones
Guardian

LA Scores Again

Berggruen is focusing on German and West Coast artists, including Chris Burden, whose Metropolis II (right) is already on loan to Lacma from the collector

The private collector and billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, son of the late German-Jewish art dealer and philanthropist Heinz Berggruen, is set to follow in the footsteps of the collector Eli Broad by sending several works on long-term loans to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma), where Berggruen is a trustee. “I’m building up a collection for Lacma,” he says, “focusing on German artists such as Thomas Schütte, Martin Kippenberger, Gerhard Richter and Joseph Beuys.” Works by West Coast artists such as John Baldessari, Ed Ruscha, Charles Ray, Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman and Mike Kelley from Berggruen’s collection are also due to end up at the museum. “Los Angeles is still a developing cultural centre and that’s why one can make a difference there,” he says. His father, Heinz Berggruen, sold his collection of modern masterpieces for $120m—one-tenth of its value—to Berlin in 2000. There is now a museum in the city to house these holdings.

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Gareth Harris
The Art Newspaper

New Money

‘Adorned with endangered or extinct species in denominations such as $6.66, the real value of $10 with environmental costs factored in.’ By Jonathan Franzen (Photograph: Joseph Sohm/Jonathan Franzen)

Global economic meltdown, the euro crisis and Occupy protests – this year has been dominated by financial issues. But what is money anyway? We invited writers and artists including Jonathan Franzen, Margaret Atwood and Naomi Klein to invent new currencies and banknotes for a changed

View images here

Guardian

Frankenthaler, Considered

Helen Frankenthaler (Photo: Getty Images)

In 1953 Helen Frankenthaler, who died this week at age 83, received a visit from Kenneth Noland and Morris Louis, two artists from Washington who were stuck in an Abstract Expressionist rut. In her studio they saw “Mountains and Sea,” of the year before, a characteristically abstract work painted by pouring pigment onto a canvas laid on the floor.

The poured-paint technique had been pioneered by Jackson Pollock a few years earlier, but in this work the 24-year-old Frankenthaler made it her own. In place of the older artist’s looping and whipping lines of gray, black and tan, her imagery consisted of spreading pools and washes of luxuriant pinks, blues and greens nudged here and there with a sponge. The painting was a revelation to the two men—a “bridge between Pollock and what was possible,” Louis later said. Her novel technique, combined with a chromatic freedom and mastery unprecedented in recent American art, helped launch them, and others, on their own paths of color abstraction, thus ultimately changing the course of American art.

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Eric Gibson
Wall Street Journal

Art Funding, EU Style

As the economic crisis deepens across Europe, the European Commission plans to launch the world’s largest ever cultural funding programme, with €1.8bn allocated for visual and performing arts, film, music, literature and architecture. The commission’s Creative Europe project plans to release the money between 2014 and 2020. If the scheme is approved late 2012, an estimated 300,000 artists are due to receive funding.
The proposal has received a mixed response from key cultural commentators, with some saying that banking on culture and the arts to help prop up EU member states and stimulate the economy is unlikely to work.

Dexter Dalwood, the UK artist nominated for the Turner Prize in 2010, is sceptical. “If the goal is to create social cohesion isn’t it going to favour obvious visible targets like classical music, the performing arts and public art?” he says. “On paper this looks fine. [But] in reality who gets the money ? Is there a hefty application process where the outcome of the work has to be clearly stated? Is there any chance it could trickle down to the most needy creative people?” Dalwood suggests the most effective form of subsidy for artists would be to make affordable studios.

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Gareth Harris
The Art Newspaper

Ai Weiwei: Can’t Make a Chestnut into a Pear

Twelve months ago, Ai Weiwei was a celebrated artist, whose Sunflower Seeds had just opened at Tate Modern to widespread acclaim.

Today he is as famous for the 81 days he spent in detention this spring as for his work. In attempting to silence him, the Chinese authorities appear to have amplified his voice.

His sudden disappearance, as he passed through immigration at Beijing airport on 3 April, shocked even the friends who had feared such a moment. His high profile, and his revered late father – the poet Ai Qing – had offered him some protection until then. Human rights groups say his detention showed that no one was immune.

It prompted a global outpouring of outrage that he admits startled even him. “I never imagined it could happen. I think it shows we are in a very different time – through the internet, the media. I had communicated so often with the outside world and made it very clear what was in my mind,” he says.

Though he says that he has learned from his experiences, he has also been clear about how damaging the period was. “You know from the first they are not going to be lawful… I felt very sorry for my family, my child, the people associated with me,” he says.

He has always insisted that China is his home – he is rare in having lived in America for years as a young man without opting for a US passport – but in his lowest moments he questioned even that decision.

“I asked myself: ‘You were so many years in the US and never got citizenship – how stupid could I be?’ You think: ‘This is dangerous.’

“You just want to get out. They ask you to sign everything… At the beginning, I thought it ridiculous. In the end I said that if I did anything wrong, I would take responsibility.”

This year has left him less innocent and more suspicious. But he suggests he emerged with fewer scars than most of the dozens taken in the wider crackdown on activists, lawyers and dissidents this year. Though none are supposed to discuss their experiences, he appears to have been treated considerably better; he thinks his age helped too.

“I’m old enough. I think younger people can be more damaged, more crushed. I have my own beliefs,” he adds. “I told them: ‘You can change the frame but you can’t change the content. You can’t make a chestnut into a pear.’”

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Tania Branigan
Guardian