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Wall tile, perforated metal screen at SOM Park Hotel
In architecture and design we have adopted new fabrication tools developed for the automobile, aerospace, medical and manufacturing industries, but construction technologies still lag behind what we are able to generate today with the current computer design technology. This is mainly due to the fact that most architects are not familiar with many of the new fabrication tools available nor the processes needed to build and specify these non-standard designs, and overall the industry is not prepared yet to fully cope with the non-traditional bidding, contracting and approval processes entailed.
Some consultant firms like designtoproduction, by Fabian Scheurer and Arnold Walz, have precisely emerged to mediate and help architects realize their designs. Integrated by specialists from various fields, desingtoproduction helps architects, engineers and manufactures to plan, detail, optimize, simplify and materialize their non-standard ideas through non-standard processes of fabrication. They worked with Zaha Hadid, for example, at the Hungerburg Funicular stations, where more than 25000 doubly curved and shaped glass profiles were cut from polyethylene boards with a controlled five-axis router. All of the geometry and fabrication data, including the sticker ID of each part, was automatically generated through their parametric 3d model.
Patricia Brizzio
Huffington Post
(Photo: MOMA)
The New York Times has decided it’s time to take on the D-word, a word so rife with scandal these days it’s astounding that the venerable paper found it fit to print: deaccessioning.
What’s truly intriguing about Robin Pogrebin’s piece, “The Permanent Collection May Not Be So Permanent,” which explores the practice of museums selling off works from their collection, is that she doesn’t choose to highlight the small institutions like the National Academy Museum or the Rose Art Museum. No, it’s not the recent hullabaloo surrounding these museums’ contentious attempts to offload works to pay for their operating expenses — the cases that have made the issue a flash-point for controversy — that Pogrebin focuses on.
Rather, the article turns to institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art — which largely deaccession works in accordance with the June 2010 policy on deaccessioning published by the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) — in the hopes, it seems, of bringing the D-word back into a lexicon of moral respectability.
ArtInfo
It’s pretty unusual for a living artist to have his or her own museum. But that honor is going to William Eggleston, known as the father of color photography as an art form.
Eggleston, 71, is lucky to be from Memphis, which is home to a museum for Elvis and to Stax, a museum for American soul music. Two years ago, a group of local philanthropists decided that giving Eggleston a museum would be good not only for him but also for the city. Together, members of the group have pledged more than $5 million to start the ball rolling.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
New World Center: Frank Gehry designed this home for the New World Symphony in Miami Beach (Moris Moreno for The New York Times)
Can an architect save classical music? That seems to be what Michael Tilson Thomas, the artistic director of the New World Symphony, was counting on when he hired Frank Gehry to design him a new music center.
Like others running classical music institutions today, Mr. Thomas is struggling to connect to a younger audience. The 81-year-old Mr. Gehry, who used to baby-sit for Mr. Thomas, 66, when both were living in Los Angeles, built his reputation as an architect with a knack for tapping into the popular imagination.
Together they have created a building, opening here on Tuesday, that spills over with populist ideas, sometimes to the point of distraction. Enclosed inside a simple stucco box, its raucous interior forms — a pileup of rehearsal studios joined to a 756-seat hall — are part of an effort to break down the emotional distance between performers and the public, and in doing so to pump new life into an art form that is often perceived as stuffy and old-fashioned.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
The work of the artist Owen Moseko was blocked from view. The artwork depicts atrocities committed a quarter century ago. (Robin Hammond for The New York Times)
The exhibit at the National Gallery is now a crime scene, the artwork banned and the artist charged with insulting President Robert Mugabe. The picture windows that showcased graphic depictions of atrocities committed in the early years of Mr. Mugabe’s 30-year-long rule are now papered over with the yellowing pages of a state-controlled newspaper.
But the government’s efforts to bury history have instead provoked slumbering memories of the Gukurahundi, Zimbabwe’s name for the slaying and torture of thousands of civilians here in the Matabeleland region a quarter century ago.
“You can suppress art exhibits, plays and books, but you cannot remove the Gukurahundi from people’s hearts,” said Pathisa Nyathi, a historian here. “It is indelible.”
Celia W. Dugger
New York Times
As art museums have expanded in the past few decades, Cassandras have warned that one day there would be a none-too-pretty reckoning. With easy money, stratospheric ambitions, hometown pride and trustee egos all at work, many arts institutions—like many homeowners—overreached.
In the past few months, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco has had its moment of truth. Fortunately, in a deal reached earlier this month, it was able to refinance a debt load that last fall threatened to throw that institution into bankruptcy. But while officials there portray the AAM as a victim of the Great Recession, it’s an open question whether AAM—or other arts institutions—should have borrowed so much money and dabbled in variable-rate demand bonds and interest-rate swaps at all. In years past, most museums would manage their endowments and borrowings conservatively. But new financial instruments have tempted them, like everyone else, to take more risks.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Wall Street Journal
An endless cycle of life, as depicted in the mosaic’s central panel. Israel Antiquities Authority
In 1996 a highway was being constructed in Lod, a town 10 miles southeast of Tel Aviv, when, as so often happens in those parts, the workers came upon an ancient and heretofore unknown archaeological site. Naturally all work stopped at once, a bevy of specialists, led by Dr. Miriam Avissar, was called in and, a few months later, a wonder was announced to the world.
The most conspicuous component of the excavations was a merchant’s house from about A.D. 300. Discovered therein was the nearly intact mosaic floor of a dining room. Of several mosaics unearthed at the site, this is the one that now stands unveiled to the general public, for the first time anywhere, in the Leon Levy and Shelby White Court in the Metropolitan Museum’s Greek and Roman Galleries. The Met is the first of four American venues to which the mosaic will travel before returning to Israel, where it will be the star of the not-yet-completed Shelby White and Leon Levy Lod Mosaic Center. At the Met, regrettably, it is accompanied by a video loop whose soundtrack, although informative, is likely to distract viewers who would prefer to contemplate the mosaics in silence.
James Gardner
Wall Street Journal
Museum of the Moving Image: Gregory Barsamian’s “Feral Fount,” a moving sculpture whose pieces become an animation under stroboscopic lighting, is part of the permanent exhibition “Behind the Screen.” Damon Winter/The New York Times
“Why have a Museum of the Moving Image at all?” is the question that readily comes to mind before visiting the new, improved, expanded incarnation of this venerable institution in Astoria, Queens, which reopens its doors on Saturday after a $67 million face-lift that might even put Hollywood cosmeticians to shame.
Yes, the fact that the Marx Brothers’ antics and Rudolph Valentino’s gaze were committed to celluloid by Paramount Pictures in this building makes a certain claim on cinematic attention. And yes, the museum’s screenings have given it much cachet with cinéastes. And sure, the making and marketing of movies are enterprises that in their importance and engrossing details deserve the kind of full-scale treatment they get here. But that would make it a museum of cinema — a very different thing.
Why “moving image”? Why keep enlarging that subject the way the museum’s founding director, Rochelle Slovin, did in opening the institution in 1988, stirring television, video games, video artwork and digital imaging into the mix?
And with this latest expansion of the museum’s size to nearly 100,000 square feet, its doubling of classroom facilities to host 60,000 students a year, its new 68-seat screening room and 267-seat theater (which during the next six weeks of celebrations will present newly restored film classics and contemporary movies), the institution’s wide-angle view is even more fully embraced. The museum, housed in a building owned by the city, which supplied nearly $55 million of the renovation costs, also has large public ambitions for its vision.
Edward Rothstein
New York Times
The remains of what was once a house in the ‘School of Gladiators. Associated Press
The scandal over conditions at the ancient Roman city of Pompeii has yet to die down since a structure known as the “School of the Gladiators” collapsed there in early November. At least three other major collapses occurred in the past two months. Italy’s President Giorgio Napolitano has called the situation a “national disgrace”; opposition parliamentarians continue to press for Culture Minister Sandro Bondi’s resignation; and in mid-December, prosecutors announced that they were investigating nine people, including Pompeii’s former superintendent, to see whether they should be charged with criminal neglect…
Recent events have thus revived a long-running national debate over why Italy cannot take better care of its rich cultural heritage. Many commentators have stressed funding shortages, noting that governments of both the right and the left have cut culture spending over the past decade. Italy’s leading financial newspaper, Il Sole 24 Ore, has even suggested that Pompeii turn to corporate sponsors like Ferrari and Coca-Cola, which might pay for the chance to associate their brands with the ruins they help preserve. Later this month, the Italian government is expected to approve tens of millions of euros in emergency funds to address the Pompeii crisis.
Francis X. Rocca
Wall Street Journal
This anti-war mural by the Italian street artist Blu on MOCA’s north wall was painted over by order of museum director Jeffrey Deitch (Photo by Casey Caplowe, courtesy Unurth)
The Blu mural controversy at MOCA is more than just another case of art world censorship. It is proof positive that street art exhibitions in the museum are inherently flawed and full of contradictions. Jeffrey Deitch’s soon-to-be blockbuster show “Art in the Streets” and the whitewashed wall mural made this point as clear as day.
Deitch, the new L.A. MOCA director, launched a pre-emptive strike on a mural by the Italian street artist Blu that he had commissioned him to paint on the side of the Geffen Contemporary building. Deitch objected to the content of the mural — a series of coffins draped with dollar bills instead of flags — because he felt that it might upset the museum’s immediate neighbors, the Japanese-American community and the veteran community at the L.A. Veterans’ Affairs Hospital. Deitch asked Blu to repaint the wall with another image, the artist refused, and an art controversy was born.
One might expect that artists in the show would stand firmly in Blu’s corner and deride Deitch’s rash decision, but the opposite seems to be the case. Passive criticism has been tampered by a parade of artists and cultural producers who have come to the defense of Deitch arguing that “Art in the Streets” is far too important to be derailed by a mural controversy. Shepard Fairey recently stated in the Los Angeles Times, “I’m not a fan of censorship but that is why I, and many of the other artists of the show, chose to engage in street art for its democracy and lack of bureaucracy.”
Nicolas Lampert
ArtInfo
