You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2010.
Thomas P Campbell, Met Museum
In his handsome office overlooking the city skyline, Thomas P Campbell, the [Metropolitan] museum’s British director, 18 months into the most prestigious job in world culture, extends the joke, talking faux-ominously of the “security issues” that allowed the children to execute their prank.
But there is a serious issue at play. Museums are having to reinvent themselves in the 21st century as they compete with the dizzying variety of audio-visual stimuli on offer. As a portentous New York Times commentary put it on the announcement of Campbell’s surprise appointment nearly two years ago: “In a culture of American Idol and Damien Hirst, the Met can no longer rely on the singularity of its objects to justify its existence.”
Campbell, a slight, softly-spoken man, bridles slightly when I read him that remark – “What does that mean?” – before taking issue with it. “I think I’d almost claim the opposite. I’d say that in a world of mass-marketing and disposable digital imagery, the Met repository of some 2m objects spanning 5,000 years is ever more important as a place of reflection, as a place where you can get a bit of space to look at things that were hard-won, the product of art.
“Whether it’s the product of artisans working in age-old traditions, or great geniuses breaking new ground, I think you get a broader perspective here, that is ever more important in the modern world.”
Peter Aspden
Financial Times
John Scarlett Davis, The Interior of the British Institution Gallery, Yale Center for British Art
People love mysteries — just look at book sales — and I always think that the art world should take more advantage of that thirst…That’s why I’m highlighting an exhibition that just started at the Yale Center for British Art.
“Seeing Double” is built around a 1829 painting called “Interior of the British Institution” by John Scarlett Davis. YCBA says Davis “sought to make a splash on the London art scene” with it. He made not only a visual puzzle but also “an exploration of the art world in the 1820s London.”
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Keith Richards … the new director of Tate Modern? Photograph: Peter Foley/EPA
The Marxist cultural critic Walter Benjamin says somewhere, I believe, in his famous essay The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction, that people will accept a radicalism in popular art forms that they will never accept from the avant gardes of “high” art. Benjamin was writing in the era of Eisenstein. A lot of cut-ups have made it into the gallery since then. Audiences at Tate Modern seem pretty schooled to expect everything pre-deconstructed in the museum. The most interesting thing now about Benjamin’s argument is that it also works the other way around. It is conversely true that the idea of the classics, the greats, the old masters, is universally accepted in pop music when it is nowadays widely spat on in the sphere of contemporary high art.
I’ve been listening to some 1960s favourites. The Beatles’ Norwegian Wood, the Rolling Stones’ Ruby Tuesday, a bit of The Incredible String Band. I hasten to add that I was only four when the 60s ended. I wasn’t at Altamont or anything. But when I was a teenager, much later, it was obvious that rock music had reached a peak of imagination and brilliance in the 1960s – and it’s still obvious. Does anyone dispute that? More crucially, does anyone think it trashes today’s music to say so? There is a maturity, a common sense about critics and consumers of popular music that is totally absent from the high arts. No one thinks it demeans Lady Gaga to admire Madonna.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
In plain sight? Two professors believe that Michelangelo hid a drawing of the underside of the brain and the brain stem on the neck and beard of God. (Photo: Neurosurgery)
It has been hiding in plain sight for the past 500 years, and now two Johns Hopkins professors believe they have found it: one of Michelangelo’s rare anatomical drawings in a panel high on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Michelangelo was a conscientious student of human anatomy and enthusiastically dissected corpses throughout his life, but few of his anatomical drawings survive. This one, a depiction of the human brain and brain stem, appears to be drawn on the neck of God, but not all art historians can see it there.
This is not the first picture of a human organ someone has found, or at least imagined, in Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes. In 1990, in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association, a physician described what he saw as a rendering of the human brain in the Creation of Adam, the panel showing God touching Adam’s finger. And one physician, a professor of medicine at Baylor University, published an article in a medical journal in 2000 suggesting that Michelangelo had included a drawing of a kidney in another ceiling panel. The author was, perhaps not coincidentally, a kidney specialist.
The latest find, described in a study in the May issue of the journal Neurosurgery, appears directly above the altar in “The Separation of Light From Darkness,” another panel from the series of nine depicting scenes from the Book of Genesis.
Nicholas Bakalar
New York Times
Summer solstice celebrations at Stonehenge. (Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP)
Sometimes the police come in for criticism, while at other times English Heritage attracts the ire of the druids, ravers, hippies and sun lovers who turn out for the summer solstice at Stonehenge.
At today’s celebrations there was a political target – David Cameron and the coalition government – following the announcement that government funding for a visitor centre at the ancient monument was being cut.
The outcry from solstice revellers was led by the unmistakeable figure of Arthur Pendragon, a druid who believes he is an incarnation of the once and future king.
Pendragon, who rejoices in the title of battle chieftain of the council of British druid orders, said he was not surprised that the £10m funding was dropped.
“I knew the writing was on the wall. I knew the new government wouldn’t stump up the money. It’s no surprise but, still, it’s a disgrace. This wouldn’t happen anywhere else in the world.”
Pendragon has campaigned for 20 years for a new visitor centre at the World Heritage site and to close at least one of the busy roads that surround the stones.
Tourists are often shocked at the state of the centre and amazed that traffic is allowed to roar past so close.
Steven Morris
Guardian
My Bed 1998, by Tracey Emin, one of the most celebrated and influential artists of her generation. (Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Observer)
Ten years ago researchers in America took two groups of three-year-olds and showed them a blob of paint on a canvas. Children who were told that the marks were the result of an accidental spillage showed little interest. The others, who had been told that the splodge of colour had been carefully created for them, started to refer to it as “a painting”.
Now that experiment – conducted by Paul Bloom, a Yale academic, and psychologist Susan Gelman – has gone on to form part of the foundation of an influential new book that questions the way in which we respond to art.
Bloom’s study, How Pleasure Works, which will be out this week, argues that there is no such thing as a pure aesthetic judgment. In developing his general theory about how humans decide what they like or dislike, he lines up evidence to show that what people believe about a work of art is crucial to the way they feel about it. He goes on to suggest that modern art collectors are partly motivated by the way they wish to be seen by the rest of the world.
More
Guardian
This major work by Louise Bourgeois was one of the exceptions
A list of the artists whose work you are most likely to see at this year’s Art Basel, based on the number of galleries who are bringing pieces, is headed—perhaps unsurprisingly—by the prolific Andy Warhol, with works on show at 28 stands. Artists making work in the first half of the 20th century rank highly, including Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso, although the list is also speckled with 1960s conceptualists such as Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner. But the top 40 most represented artists on show at the fair are all men
Lindsay Pollack
The Art Newspaper
The West haunts American photography as the South haunts American literature — if for opposite reasons. Lush and complicatedly peopled, the South is burdened with history. “The past is never dead,’’ William Faulkner wrote in words that are as much boast as warning. “It’s not even past.’’
The West, in contrast, could have been created with the camera in mind: stark and empty and bracingly new (terrifyingly new, too). The South may feel foreign to us, but the West looks alien. In documenting it, photographers from Timothy O’Sullivan and William Henry Jackson in the 19th century to Ansel and Robert Adams in the 20th to Richard Misrach today have made it seem at least a little less alien.
Mark Ruwedel belongs in their company. His West is riotously austere and beautifully desolate: a Beckett landscape so empty of human life that even Beckett’s lost souls would feel out of place there. Yet one crucial aspect distinguishes Ruwedel’s work from that of his predecessors. As much archeology as art, his images explicitly remind us that the West has a past, one immensely longer in duration than the past of cowboys and Indians we see in westerns. “California is west of the West,’’ Theodore Roosevelt once said. The parts of Texas, Colorado, Utah, and California that Ruwedel photographs aren’t west of the West. They’re so desolate they almost seem underneath the West.
Mark Feeney
Boston Globe
In what some critics describe as a long overdue effort, the Museum of Modern Art in New York is this month publishing “Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art.” The 500-page book, in the works for more than four years, is the centerpiece of a larger initiative to shine a light on women artists. From last December through summer, 2011, MoMA’s curatorial departments are mounting 15 large and small exhibitions that highlight and temporarily increase the presence of works by women in the museum.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Pundicity
(Photo: Omega Institute for Holistic Studies)
In recent years, lower impact “green buildings” have crept up in popularity. But a new movement believes that these measures have not gone nearly far enough — that even today’s ecoconscious apartments and offices produce waste and greenhouse gases, while merely scaling back the damage. What we need to do, according to the architects and scientists driving this movement, is fundamentally rethink the concept of a building.
Sometimes called “biomimetic” or “regenerative” architecture, this approach applies insights from nature to the built environment, and seeks to blur the distinction between the two. In some cases, this means mimicking specific functions of organisms or their habitats. In other cases, the emulation is more general: conceiving of buildings as closed-loop ecosystems that, like a forest or a savanna, draw their energy from the elements and produce no net waste — and perhaps even improve the surrounding environment.
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow
Boston Globe
