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Winning formula … Damien Hirst’s Grey Periodic Table, part of the invaluable Artist Rooms collection. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
I’ve said it before and I will say it again, because it really matters: the Artist Rooms collection, founded in 2008 through the generous vision of the art dealer Anthony d’Offay, is a startling national asset. As it begins a fourth successive tour of galleries throughout Britain, this public collection of contemporary art is changing the very fabric of our visual culture.
There is only one contrast, one conflict that matters when it comes to art. Modern versus traditional? Don’t be daft. Painting versus installation? Yawn. The only struggle that matters is the timeless war between good and bad art. In Britain, because of prejudices rooted deep in our history, museums have long possessed plenty of examples of great Renaissance or Romantic art, but few masterpieces of modernity. This distorts our entire experience of art: it makes arguments about artistic value oddly thin and ideological, because people are unfamiliar with first-rate examples of the art of the past 50 years.
Artist Rooms is changing all that. This collection could easily fill a museum of its own, and would be a major national attraction if it did. But it is being used in a far more radical and liberating way. With the support of the Art Fund, its outstanding examples of works by the best artists of recent times are shown in rotation in public galleries around Britain. Museums get a boost, and audiences everywhere are introduced to top-quality modern art. In the latest round of exhibitions, there is even a game to make it still more accessible to a young public.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
There are three reasons to be sceptical about the Harpa concert hall. One is that it is promoted as a “unique” artist-architect collaboration, when such collaborations are quite commonplace and often involve an alliance between architects with too little confidence in their ability to design buildings and an artist with too much. Then it is called “crystalline”, a word usually applied by hack practices to glass boxes with a few wonky angles.
And it is in Iceland, the country that went so spectacularly bust that the British government mobilised anti-terrorism laws to freeze its assets. What business have they, three years after leading the world into the abyss, to be opening a $150m (£90m) building, with four halls for music and conferences, the largest of which has 1,800 seats, in a country of 300,000 people, and in a city the size of Ipswich?
The facade of Harpa is the work of an artist, the Icelandic-Danish Olafur Eliasson, who gets more attention and a higher billing than the hall’s architects, the 52-year-old practice Henning Larsen Architects. They wear sober suits; Eliasson’s leather waistcoat and silver-framed shades suggest creative leadership. His job is to provide that service that would once have been performed by Corinthian columns and statues of buxom nudes: to endow the house of culture with meaning and importance. He has come up with a tilted cliff face made of multiple hexagonal glass tubes, with coloured and mirrored panes inserted here and there. Inside, the hexagons continue, forming a faceted and mirrored ceiling to the foyer.
Rowan Moore
Guardian
When the American Folk Art Museum opened its new building on West 53rd Street in December 2001, it was widely hailed as a sign of hope, both for the museum and New York.
Here was evidence the city could recover from the terrorist attack of a few months earlier: a shiny bronze structure smack in the heart of Midtown that would be the first major art museum to open in Manhattan since the Whitney Museum in 1966.
Today that building is owned by another institution. The museum has defaulted on its construction bonds, moved into its old, smaller space near Lincoln Center and is talking of dissolving and transferring its collections to another institution.
The final outcome still is not clear. But the museum’s descent into financial trouble is a parable about how poor decisions and unfortunate timing can undermine even the most noble of ambitious undertakings.
Robin Pogrebin
New York Times
Paul Klee famously said that a drawing is simply a line going for a walk. The formulation was taken up by artists of all stripes, from die-hard abstract modernists to Crockett Johnson, the man who created “Harold and the Purple Crayon.’’
But of course, a line is singular, whereas life is bewilderingly plural. The three artists in “Emerging Dis/Order,’’ an excellent contemporary drawing show at the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine, remind us that lines are multidirectional. They swarm and multiply, and will not be kept on a leash.
“Emerging Dis/Order’’ – an unfortunate title that all but screams “Fussy academics in charge!’’ – is, against the odds, an ambitious, approachable show well worth visiting. A better title might have been “Swarm Intelligence,’’ which one of the artists, Alison Hildreth, used for a series of paintings she worked on in 2005. It captures exactly the quality these three women have in common: a fascination with how forms multiply, divide, and coalesce again.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
Petit Interieur a la table de Marbre Ronde
There’s a great big metaphysical joke at the core of the genius that was Henri Matisse, and it has to do with the idea of work, of labor, of effort.
Matisse, in his full-throated maturity, represents the opposite of these things. His work stands for ease and effortless beauty, and for an almost total absence of pressure – the pressure of careful outlines and fastidiously filled-in paint and, by extension, of life itself, with its repressed desires, irreconcilable demands, and emotional heavy-lifting.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
In line for McQueen
Museum circles are rejoicing this weekend, as two very popular exhibitions close: At the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Chihuly: Through the Looking Glass is on track to be the museum’s fifth most popular exhibit ever. Although we won’t know the final number until tomorrow, when it closes a day after originally planned, more than 360,000 people had seen the show as of Friday morning. So the final total could be on the order of 400,000.
In New York, Alexander McQueen mania is even more virulent. In horrible heat and humidity, people have been waiting four hours to get in to see Savage Beauty, as his costumes have been tagged. The Met has extended hours, and in a final flourish announced that it would stay open till midnight Saturday and today — something it has never tried before and a move I applaud.
The McQueen attendance last number I saw — it was unclear from the reports exacty when this was taken — was 650,000, the highest ever for a Costume Institute exhibition and, probably, the eighth most popular exhibit ever. It’s touch-and-go whether its attendance will move into the No. 7 slot, edging out last year’s Picasso exhibition, which drew 703,256 visitors.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
Nothing can really compare to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “El Jaleo’’ or the Museum of Fine Arts’ “The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit,’’ but when I’m asked to name my favorite picture by John Singer Sargent, I often nominate this one.
It’s a great picture – but, I freely admit, it’s also personal. My wife, a violinist, ran off to Paris to join the circus, and it so happened she chose the Cirque d’Hiver. She was kind enough to bring me with her, and so I spent a lot of time in the steeply sweeping, circular interior depicted here by Sargent.
Sebastian Smee
Boston Globe
The traditional gallery model is in decline, according to a new report by the non-profit dealers’ federation Cinoa (Confédération Internationale des Négociants en Oeuvres d’Art), which found that fair-led and online business is taking over as the main source of revenue.
Gallery visits are declining as the art market expands to new international centres served better by art fairs or electronic media.
“We do much more business at the fairs than at the gallery—no question,” said Dominique Lévy, the co-director of L&M gallery.
András Szántó, consultant and contributing editor to The Art Newspaper, said: “The fairs have done very well in exploiting a structural weakness of the gallery system—it is inchoate and based on local markets.” With the withdrawal of those markets during the downturn “the overall weight has shifted to clients who don’t live where you work—so you service them through art fairs,” said dealer David Zwirner.
According to a recent report from Capgemini, the Asia-Pacific region has overtaken the west in terms of the number of individuals with investable assets worth $1m or more. It is no coincidence that the Hong Kong art fair, Art HK, in which Art Basel bought a 60% stake in May, attracted such a stellar line-up of western dealers this year.
Charlotte Burns
The Art Newspaper
