You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2010.
Collector Peter Brant in wax by Swiss artist Urs Fischer
Sometimes in the art world, it’s money that matters, and this is one of those times. While the New York auctions raised triple the amount at a similar set of sales six months ago, to some degree the well-choreographed evenings just obscured what was really going on. Sales at the city’s 300-plus art galleries are actually still flagging, and a shakeout is going on over which artists matter and who will make it into the art-history books. The shakeout is amplifying the power of the relatively tiny cabal of people who do keep buying at the highest levels, and it’s shifting who and what people are paying attention to.
This season, it wasn’t so much who sold well, but which artists, schools and movements surprisingly weren’t on the block at all because the auctioneers didn’t even know if there was a market for them anymore. Buyers and sellers are so confused about the ultimate art-historical importance of such recently “superhot”movements as the Leipzig School (Germany), Chinese Contemporary Art (Beijing) and the so-called Young British Artists (London) that auction houses offered work from virtually none of them. A safer bet was to offer works by artists like Mr. Fischer, for example, because of his powerful fans and because he’s just a few months away from an well-recieved retrospective at the New Museum.
Alexandra Peers
New York Observer
A rendering of the lobby in Renzo Piano’s ethereal glass addition to Kimbell Art Museum, a Louis Kahn masterpiece of Modern architecture, in Fort Worth.
It’s fair to ask if Renzo Piano was fully sane when he agreed to design the addition to Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Art Museum.
Kahn occupies a privileged place within the pantheon of America’s great architects, and the Kimbell in Fort Worth, completed in 1972, is his masterpiece. Adding to the pressure, major museum expansions were increasingly coming under fire as wasteful expressions of gilded-age hubris. Mr. Piano is likely to be vilified by both architecture fans and art world purists no matter what he comes up with.
It’s true that Mr. Piano’s design, which will be officially unveiled on Thursday, is not as transcendent a work of architecture as the original Kimbell. Nor does it quite live up to his own masterpiece, the 1987 Menil Collection building in Houston. But Mr. Piano has managed to find that magical and elusive balance between respecting a great work and adhering to one’s own aesthetic convictions. Unlike some of his contemporaries, who might have sought to play up the generational divide, Mr. Piano, who worked for Kahn early in his career, builds his design on the touching, if idealistic, notion of a civilized conversation across the ages.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
BE ON GUARD! 1921. The infant USSR was threatened with invasion, famine and social unrest. To counter this, brilliant designers such as Dimitri Moor were employed to create pro-Bolshevik propaganda.
Ten of the greatest: Maps that changed the world. Using a map of European Russia and its neighbours, Moor’s image of a heroic Bolshevik guard defeating the invading ‘Whites’ helped define the Soviet Union in the Russian popular imagination.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-1272921/Ten-greatest-maps-changed-world.html#ixzz0p8bMQqRj
From the USSR’s Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever.
To view the maps, click here.
Peter Barber
Mail Online
(Photographs by Marco Anelli)
Performance art, as currently practiced, emerged as an avant garde movement in the 1960s and ’70s, and some of its features made it difficult to visualize how it might make the transition from galleries and public spaces to the more institutional environment of the museum.
For one thing, the medium of the artist is his or her own body, sometimes nude or engaged in highly dangerous circumstances. Pictures of nude bodies doing dangerous things raise no such obstacles in a museum space, but performance art itself is real in all dimensions. Before it can be translated and presented in a museum, a number of problems, both practical and philosophical, must be worked out.
Arthur C. Danto
New York Times
The Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas was designed by architect Frank Gehry. (Photo: Isaac Brekken, For The Times)
Frank Gehry’s buildings can look unfinished or unruly — even a bit chaotic. But they often have surprisingly direct metaphorical stories to tell.
Walt Disney Concert Hall is a joyously informal ship of state for a city keen to come together, if only for a few hours, in a collective experience. Gehry’s own house in Santa Monica, a modest pink bungalow the architect wrapped in colliding layers of corrugated metal and chain link, is an unabashed affirmation of the workaday, un-pretty built landscape of Southern California.
In the case of Gehry’s newest project, the riotously sculptural $100-million Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, the story is about the depths — and ultimately the limits — of the human mind.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
(Photo:David Bebber/The Times)
Tate Modern is ten years old. The redundant Bankside Power Station — younger twin of Battersea — is a miracle of creative re-use by the Prada-clad, bullet-headed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron. If ever there were professional archetypes, here they are. Their countryman C. G. Jung could not have specified attributes more box-tickingly perfect. Still, they have done a wonderful job. A postwar romantic industrial building has been thrillingly reconceptualised into the most popular modern art venue in the world. It was designed for 1.8 million visitors a year, but gets 4.7 million. (Runners-up are the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with 3.5 million, and the New York Museum of Modern Art, with 2.8 million.) Only a very dull person would fail to gasp at the sublime space of the eviscerated turbine hall — the essential internal experience for the visitor. No matter how often I visit, I am always astonished. But in its cavernous emptiness there may be a metaphor struggling to be put into words. Despite its success — Tate Modern is one of the top three “attractions” in the country — is there something empty at the heart of the whole boggling project?
Tate Modern has become a temple of the international art “world”. This needs explaining. Certainly, temples have priests and belief systems, and Tate has these in spades. But anything with the word “world” suffixed — as in dog world — does not mean a mondain connection to the planet-at-large.
Stephen Bayley
Times Online
On the record … OMA’s vast publishing output on show at the AA School, London. Photograph: Architectural Association
In Britain we’re sceptical of the idea of the architect as intellectual. Most people probably aren’t aware that there’s a whole realm of architecture that doesn’t involve erecting buildings. But from Vitruvius in the 1st century BC and Alberti and Palladio in the Renaissance to Le Corbusier in the 1920s, architects have always produced books, not just to publicise their work but to lay down the latest architectural rules.
Often these titles tend to be monographs. Light of text and glossy of photograph, they are hefty volumes, records of achievement – a chance for the architect to say “Look on my works, ye mighty, and leave them casually stacked on the coffee table”. But Rem Koolhaas’s books, produced with his Rotterdam-based practice Office for Metropolitan Architecture, are different, as a new show at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London’s Bedford Square demonstrates. On a plinth in the middle of the room sit 400 volumes bound together in black folders. They look like endless meeting agendas, but they are the complete works of OMA from 1978 to 2010. If you stood this object on the floor, it would be as tall as two people, one stood on top of the other. No wonder the show is called OMA Book Machine.
Justin McGuirk
Guardian
The new Pompidou Center in Metz, France, is generating big buzz in the architectural world. Its striking roof has been compared to a floppy hat or a swimming manta ray. (Photos by Jacques Brinon/Associated Press)
It’s France’s newest architectural wonder, and it looks something like an enormous, white floppy sun hat.
Or a giant, swimming manta ray. Or maybe an alien spacecraft.
The new Pompidou Center art museum in the eastern French city of Metz has generated a big buzz in the architecture world, largely for its complex freeform roof. When it opened to the public last week, the strange and arresting building likely overshadowed the Picassos, Dalis and Warhols it is exhibiting.
The building is all the more surreal for its setting amid the stern gray clock towers and church steeples of Metz, chosen for its strategic location near Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium.
Angela Doland
Courier-Journal
(Photo: Luna Park)
In my travels across New York City documenting street art and graffiti, I’m always excited when I stumble across full-blown illicit installations. While stenciling and wheatpasting continue to explode in popularity, it takes another level of commitment, chutzpah if you will, to pull off something more involved.
Using salvaged or re-appropriated materials, NYC street artists are both piggybacking their pieces onto existing street furniture and brazenly installing work of their own. There are highly skilled carpenters and iron workers amongst the ranks of artists — the sole unifying factor in an otherwise diverse group is the placement of their work on the street. Some pieces last but a few hours, but you’d be surprised how many fly under the radar and run for years.
To see images, go here.
Luna Park
Guest post on Hrag Vartanian’s Hyperallergic
Inside the Metz Pompidou
The cultural grand tour of Europe will have another stopping off point from this week – Metz, the Bilbao of the North. President Nicolas Sarkozy will officially open a €86m (£74m) branch of the Pompidou Centre in Paris in a beautiful, but comparatively little visited, cathedral city 170 miles east of Paris.
Metz (population 280,000), a former garrison town in the heart of the Lorraine steel belt, hopes to recreate the success of the European branch of New York’s Guggenheim museum, which has transformed the fortunes of Bilbao in northern Spain since 1997.
Like the Bilbao Guggenheim, the Centre Pompidou-Metz has been given a spectacular and unconventional building. It resembles a white Teletubby house; or a collapsed parasol; or a giant stingray.
John Lichfield
The Independent
