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Why do we want students to learn about the arts? Is it for their social benefits? Because they “save” students who are little interested in math or English? Because they teach tolerance for other viewpoints?
Why are we all for arts education?
I’d guess that many (most?) Arts Journal readers don’t even think about the why. We just know the arts are intrinsically wonderful. But are we making the best argument for arts in education?
Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University, doesn’t think so. In a recent post on his blog on Brainstorm, the group blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education, he offers “How Not to Save The Arts.” It refers, in turn, to an article he wrote for Education Next called “Advocating for the Arts in the Classroom.“
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Bathers with a Turtle, 1907-08, Matisse (Photo: Saint Louis Art Museum)
In 2003, the Museum of Modern Art put on an important show comparing Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, maybe the two greatest European painters of the 20th century. They were friends and rivals; they influenced and even collected each other’s work.
Now a marvelous new show at MoMA — “Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917″ — suggests one central way Matisse was very different from Picasso. The Spanish master, practically a synonym for modern art, had an unstoppable sense of direction. He’d pursue one style — a Blue Period, a Rose Period, Cubism — and when he got to the bottom of it, he’d move on to another.
But in the four-year period this Matisse show investigates, that artist’s development emerges as much less linear, much less divided into straightforward chapters. Matisse seemed to be trying all sorts of different things at the same time, and he produced some of his greatest paintings. But it would be hard for anyone not an art historian to place the work in chronological order.
Lloyd Schwartz
NPR
Site of Broad’s museum on Grand Ave
Eli Broad has picked New York-based firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro to design his new art museum for downtown, the philanthropist announced at a Grand Avenue Authority Committee hearing today. Diller Scofidio + Renfro was recently selected to build the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive’s (BAM/PFA) new building, and was one of two firms behind New York’s High Line. The firm also worked on the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. The Committee approved plans for Broad’s museum, and he announced his plans to put the project on the downtown site minutes after their vote. Gensler will serve as executive architect. UPDATE: From the press release: Construction of the three-story parking garage will begin in October 2010, while construction on the museum is anticipated to begin in spring 2011 and be completed in late 2012.
Detail of a winged child playing the flute, before and after cleaning. Photograph: Courtesy of the Courtauld Institute
Spectacular 2,000-year-old Hellenistic-style wall paintings have been revealed at the world heritage site of Petra through the expertise of British conservation specialists. The paintings, in a cave complex, had been obscured by centuries of black soot, smoke and greasy substances, as well as graffiti.
Experts from the Courtauld Institute in London have now removed the black grime, uncovering paintings whose “exceptional” artistic quality and sheer beauty are said to be superior even to some of the better Roman paintings at Herculaneum that were inspired by Hellenistic art.
Virtually no Hellenistic paintings survive today, and fragments only hint at antiquity’s lost masterpieces, while revealing little about their colours and composition, so the revelation of these wall paintings in Jordan is all the more significant. They were created by the Nabataeans, who traded extensively with the Greek, Roman and Egyptian empires and whose dominion once stretched from Damascus to the Red Sea, and from Sinai to the Arabian desert.
Dalya Alberge
Guardian
Tate has become the focal point of Britain’s love affair with modern art – and all the Tate galleries are free. Photograph: the Guardian
As all public funding for the arts comes under the biggest assault in living memory, it is natural and necessary to assert that museums and galleries are beacons of civilisation, to be protected. Free museum entry is a marvel of British culture. And yet … let’s not close our minds. Otherwise the debates will happen among the coalition’s radical thinkers, and defenders of museums will find themselves sidestepped. To ask one radical question: does not the British love affair with contemporary art totally undermine the culture of public funding for the arts? Damien Hirst is one of the richest artists in history; the most prestigious event in the visual art calendar is the Frieze art fair. None of this has much to do with state subsidies – does it?
The always readable critic Waldemar Januszczak wrote recently in praise of Charles Saatchi. It was Saatchi, not Serota, who created the British modern art boom, he argued. The current reverence for the Tate is, in his eyes, misplaced – actually it was a private collector who launched our addiction to the new.
There is, absolutely, a case to be made that art is a commodity, full stop. Britain’s famous artists believe that more openly than anyone. But the truth is more complicated (surprise).
The art marketplace is in reality a splendid example of a mixed economy. The rise of the Hirst generation depended on constant interaction of private and public enthusiasm. Above all, it depended on the Turner prize, whose authority depended in turn on its being staged by a public museum.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Earlier this year came word from New York about one of the more intriguing architecture competitions to emerge in some time. Sukkah City asked architects to reimagine the sukkah, a temporary hut-like structure built in the fall to commemorate the week-long Jewish festival of Sukkot.
Twelve finalists in the competition — whose designs will go on display in Manhattan’s Union Square Park on Sept. 19 and 20 — were announced today, picked by a jury that included architect Thom Mayne, New Yorker architecture critic Paul Goldberger and designer Ron Arad. Among the finalists is the New York firm Solid Objectives – Idenburg Liu, which also won this year’s MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program, as well as one Los Angeles architect, Volkan Alkanoglu. New Yorkers will vote on the completed designs and choose a single winner.
As the competition’s background materials put it, “Ostensibly the sukkah’s religious function is to commemorate the temporary structures that the Israelites lived in during their exodus from Egypt, but it is also about universal ideas of transience and permanence as expressed in architecture.”
Given the fragile state of the economy and the growing prominence of temporary architecture of all kinds, the competition also seems timely in ways that have little to do with Jewish history.
Christopher Hawthorne
Los Angeles Times
A detail of the Stata Center at MIT. Photographer: James S. Russell/Bloomberg
The $300 million Stata Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology doesn’t look much like a research lab. Its brightly colored collision of angular and cylindrical forms seems to line-dance down dour Vassar Street in Cambridge.
Many observers assumed the 720,000-square-foot, nine-story collage couldn’t work as a research center either. Then came a lawsuit.
After the building opened in 2004, it developed several problems, including leaks, cracking bricks, mold and globs of snow crashing on the sidewalk. MIT sued Stata’s architect, Frank O. Gehry, and Beacon Skanska, its builder, in 2007 without naming a figure for damages.
The skeptics gleefully piled on. John Silber, the former president of Boston University, called it a disaster. He had put Stata on the cover of his book “Architecture of the Absurd: How ‘Genius’ Disfigured a Practical Art.”
Many commentators presumed that Gehry was heedless of practicalities, that Stata’s spectacular form was purely artistic whim and that MIT had nothing better to do than indulge its celebrity architect. Witold Rybczynski, architecture critic at the website Slate, made Stata the star of a cavalcade of alleged architectural failures last February, the implication being that bad things only happen to famous buildings.
James S. Russell
Bloomberg
The Egyptian capital’s Museum of Islamic Art — the world’s largest — was officially reopened by President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday after an eight-year restoration project.
However the public will still have to wait another two weeks until the start of September to be able to view its 25 galleries containing 2,500 artefacts of great artistic or historic value, chosen from some 100,000 items.
Culture Minister Faruq Hosni, who also attended the official reopening after the 10-million-dollar renovation, said the project had resulted in “a great change in the way the works are exhibited, protected and lit.”
Among the treasures on show are a gold-inlaid key to the Kaaba, the massive building that houses the black stone in the Grand Mosque in the holy city of Mecca, and the oldest Islamic dinar ever found, dating back to the year 697.
Rare manuscripts of the Koran can also be seen among exhibits as diverse as Persian carpets, Ottoman-era ceramics and ancient instruments used in the sciences of astronomy, chemistry and architecture.
The 1903 building in central Cairo was originally built to house and protect the country’s rich heritage from looters of antiquities.
Agence France-Presse
I don’t know Steven M. Davis, but he’s in the running for my favorite museum architect.
Davis, of Davis Brody Bond, is an architect of the National 9-11 Memorial Museum, and last week he characterized the project for The Wall Street Journal this way:
“In contrast with museums where viewing the building exterior is part of the experience, the memorial museum will be underground and unseen from the surface, said Steven M. Davis, the museum’s architect and partner of Davis Brody Bond LLP.
‘The exhibits are the icon. It’s the inverse of a traditional museum in those respects,’ Mr. Davis said.”
I wonder if Davis could speak with the likes of Richard Meier and Daniel Libeskind.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Eight years in the making … Matisse’s Bathers by a River. Photograph: Jemal Countess/Getty Images
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a cracking Matisse exhibition on at the moment. Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917 concentrates on four years of the painter’s life, in which he scratched and gouged his way to a whole new style. Or, I should say, set of styles – so extraordinarily various are the ways he attacked his art in those years.
Superbly curated, the show is especially fascinating because real trouble has been taken to put these paintings in the context of the works that influenced their creation, as well as in the context of Matisse’s previous experiments with subject matter and composition. “Cezanne, hmm, yes,” you say, looking hard at an oddly proportioned Cezanne and seeing, sort of, how it relates to the figure in the Matisse to its right. “Legs too short.”
You start to get a sense of how urgently Matisse is trying to convey how he actually saw – how the quotidian physical world, for him, was vibrating with possibility; how volumes, planes and blocks of colour interrelate; how gestures in paint could negotiate between the typical and the particular.
Sam Leith
Guardian
