Names And Memorials Names are a powerful memorial in our culture. Michael Kimmelman ponders the likelihood of some sort of list of names at the World Trade Center site as a memorial. "The competition guidelines for the memorial at ground zero require that the design 'recognize each individual who was a victim' on Sept. 11, 2001, and on Feb. 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked. It's a safe bet that many of the 5,200 submissions interpret that as some kind of list of names. By aesthetic and social consensus, names are today a kind of reflexive memorial impulse, lists of names having come almost automatically to connote 'memorial,' just as minimalism has come to be the presumptive sculptural style for memorial design, the monumental blank slate onto which the names can be inscribed." The New York Times 08/31/03

• Politics Of Picking Memorials With more than 5000 entries in the design competition for a World Trade Center memorial, how do jurors go about choosing? "In the first round, a jury typically tries to eliminate 75 percent to 80 percent of the entries. Richard Andrews, the director of the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle, said that sophisticated juries could rule out some entries within 10 seconds. 'But there will also be entries where three or four of the jurors say they didn't see anything and one will say: `Look at it again. Here's what I found.' And it will be held over for a second round.' That's when jurors really start debating and discussing stylistic differences among submissions." The New York Times 08/31/03

• Architect Behind The Buildings Architect David Childs is having a major impact on the skyline of New York. "At Skidmore Owings & Merrill, you don't know what my next building will look like. You know what a Richard Meier building will look like; there's a style. I'm more like Eero Saarinen, whom I revere. His buildings all look different." Buildings as "egoistic big statements," as Mr. Childs put it, do not interest him. Making the fabric of the city is what excites him most: how streets thread their way through avenues and parks, how they open vistas to rivers or create a neighborhood." The New York Times 08/31/03

• Back To What Was? The World Trade Center Restoration Movement is a group of people who want to retore the World Trade Center to pre-9/11. "In close solidarity with one another, and in opposition to the city's political establishment, business leaders, academics and civic groups, and just about everyone else whose opinion matters, the W.T.C.R.M. demands that the World Trade Center towers be rebuilt. Not replaced by something new and supposedly better. Rebuilt, hewing as closely as possible to the design of the buildings that were lost on Sept. 11." The New York Times 08/31/03

• Whose Freedom Gets The Museum? Should there be a "Museum of Freedom" built at the site of the World Trade Center? The idea has been proposed. But Herbert Muschamp writes that trying to wedge the idea of "freedom" into a building is highly problematic... The New York Times 08/31/03

Trying To Save Munch The Oslo city council has approved $6.6. million to preserve the works of Edvard Munch. "Very few of Munch's paintings are in top condition. Most of them are now peeling so much that we have no chance of doing our job with so few staff. The classic Skrik was painted on cardboard and is so even more vulnerable to damage. Munch never applied any protective layering to his paintings. He wanted to keep the matt finish, so he never varnished his paintings." Aftenposten (Norway) 08/29/03

The Multi-Purpose Public Space What's needed for the World Trade Center space, argues Justin Davidson, is something that can serve many functions. A new exhibition gives "a sense of how many simultaneous functions a public space can serve. Italian urbanists long ago understood the beauty of an open square - or ellipse, lopsided trapezoid, or whatever shape streets and houses would permit - on which civic, religious and commercial institutions front and which different generations adapt to their own purposes. These are hybrid areas, where the sacred rubs up against the profane." Newsday 08/29/03

Who Stole Leonardo Who stole the Leonardo painting in Scotland? "His fee, measured in millions, will in all likelihood fund an international drugs deal. Serious Crime Squad detectives, drafted into Dumfries-shire in the wake of yesterday’s theft, believe the Madonna was stolen to order. The theft had all the hallmarks. The thieves bypassed other masterpieces in the Duke of Buccleuch’s Drumlanrig Castle to steal the smaller but infinitely more valuable Da Vinci." The Scotsman 08/28/03

History's Great Art Thefts The theft of a Leonardo painting this week adds to a list of famous art heists in history. Here's a list of some of the most notorius... "If you're going to allow public access, particularly to a location of this sort, which is not in the centre of a major city, it is difficult to guard against this type of attack." BBC 08/28/03

Stolen Leonardo A Leonardo painting has been stolen in southern Scotland. "The work, known as Madonna with the Yarnwinder, was owned by the Duke of Buccleuch and on display at Drumlanrig Castle, in southern Scotland. Police said they were looking for four men seen driving near the castle in a white Volkswagen Golf Gti today." The Guardian (UK) 08/27/03

• Following Leads Scottish police have found the getaway car used by the brazen art thieves who swiped a Leonardo yesterday, but are still looking for the thieves themselves. The car was found abandoned in the woods near Drumlanrig Castle, and authorities are searching for a second car. The stolen painting is, of course, impossible to sell, and it has been added to Interpol's database of major artworks which are missing or stolen. BBC 08/28/03

Michael The One-Gloved Muse "The history of art holds many examples of performers who have ignited the imagination of artists. Compelled to bask in their often strange and lurid glow, artists draw closer, like moths to the flame... If a group of emerging Toronto artists is to be believed, Michael Jackson serves as just such a lightning rod today." Yup, it's that Michael Jackson, and much of the art inspired by His Strangeness is every bit the sarcastic dreck you'd expect. Still, "some of the work is surprisingly sincere." The Globe & Mail (Canada) 08/28/03

We Live In An 850-Year-Old House... The oldest continually-inhabited house in Britain has been identified. It was completed between 1148 and 1150 and is in Somerset. The news "stunned the owners of the house, James and Anna Wynn, who sold a small terrace house and left London five years ago to find somewhere with more room for their growing family and a bit of history." The Guardian (UK) 08/27/03

Finalists For The New Picture Prize Finalists have been chosen for the first Schweppes portrait prize, an international competition with £15,000 awarded to the winner. "The prize is the successor to the John Kobal photographic portrait award, which until it ended last year was recognised as one of the most distinguished photography competitions. The new prize attracted more than 3,000 images from 1,212 professional and amateur photographers of which 60 have been selected for the exhibition's opening at the National Portrait Gallery in London in November." The Guardian (UK) 08/27/03

Astrup Painting To Hit The Block When a painting by Nikolai Astrup goes up for auction later this fall, it will be the first time in almost a decade that a work by the Norwegian master will have been made available for public sale. "What is more remarkable about this work, which can fetch around [US$200,000], is that it was acquired for a three-cent lottery ticket in 1926, newspaper Bergensavisen reports." Aftenposten (Oslo) 08/27/03

Wood Panelling "The Library of Congress has acquired veteran cartoonist Art Wood's enormous collection of 36,000 works by 2,800 artists, the largest private collection in the world." Wood is arguably the most passionate collector and admirer of cartoon art in the world, and he has a long history at the Library, having first taken a job there at the age of 16. A successful cartoonist in his own right, Wood has always been fascinated with the medium, once writing that a good cartoon "scratches across the surface of life, whether the raw slums of the teeming city or the palatial mansion of the millionaire. It tells perhaps better than any medium what people are really like." Washington Post 08/27/03

The New Museums Museums have been monuments to the past. But they're evolving. "We have once again begun to see museums as our forebears did: as palaces of edification and delight, buildings that enhance the cultural life of cities and the intellectual lives of their inhabitants. Technology is playing a huge part in this revitalisation. Audio guides, animatronics, oral reconstructions, video, computer graphics, interactive displays, computers that recreate the sights, sounds and even smells of days gone by, all feature increasingly heavily in the museums of today." The Telegraph (UK) 08/27/03

Defining The Hirshhorn "For many years the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, a part of the Smithsonian museum empire, has been identity-free. The Hirshhorn has never equaled the National Gallery of Art's prestige and has never become as beloved as the Phillips. It's long been a humdrum museum bunkered in an abominable Gordon Bunshaft building, with a so-so collection and a so-so exhibition schedule. Still, the Hirshhorn has always had great promise..." Artnet.com 08/25/03

Art In Edinburgh - How Do You Know What's There? The Edinburgh Festival was a great success, and crowds have been pouring into the big Monet show. But as far as visual arts in the rest of the Scottish capital, things have been decidedly less promoted. "Altogether there are well over 100 exhibitions to choose from, but the sector is too fragmented to reach the public it should command. It is almost impossible even to find out everything that is going on." The Scotsman 08/26/03

The Risky, Obvious Choice That Is Calatrava Choosing Santiago Calatrava to design the tranport hub under the World Trade Center site is both "obvious and more than a little risky," writes Christopher Hawthorne. "Why obvious? Because no architect in the world can match Calatrava's talent for investing complex transportation projects, which are often pretty bland architecturally, with the kind of eye-catching, high-design appeal the public is expecting at Ground Zero. His buildings are rigorously conceived and meticulously executed but also playful, airy, and imaginative—a perfect combination of right and left brain. Why risky? Because Calatrava's work has a personality—a pristine, sometimes aloof perfectionism—that seems an odd fit for the constricted and politically charged Ground Zero site." Slate 08/25/03

Venice Has Sunk Two Feet... Venice has sunk 24 inches in 300 years, says a new study based on historic paintings. "The study, published in the latest issue of the journal Climatic Change, analyzed eight paintings by Giovanni Antonio Canal, nicknamed Canaletto, (1697-1768) and three by his lesser-known nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1720-1780). Both artists produced their paintings with the help of a portable camera obscura, a lens that projects images onto sketch pads. The trick, described by Leonardo da Vinci 250 years earlier, enabled them to reproduce accurate urban landscapes, complete with the lines of green scum formed by algae left on canal-side buildings by retreating high tides." Discovery 08/24/03

The BBC's Architecture Problem The BBC is having difficulty choosing an architect and design for a new concert hall. "Faced with the embarrassing discovery that none of the five architects it had invited to design a showcase concert hall at White City came anywhere near meeting its budget, the BBC is having to learn quickly that an architectural competition is no guarantee of great architecture. On one level, the corporation has only itself to blame. The real problem with architectural competitions is not of the BBC's making. It, at least, is serious about building - but it has been swept along by the illusion that architectural competitions are a cultural duty - a myth perpetuated by self-important clients and socially dysfunctional architects." The Observer (UK) 08/24/03

Where Art Is Hot "There is optimism and excitement in British art right now, despite its philosophical malaise. If a lot of the excitement is manufactured by editors, ad-men and PR personnel, it is also true that there is a hunger for art that amounts to something more than a trend. It's a hunger that persists, even as the taste for art as fashion continues to be so generously indulged. If it were somehow possible to reinvest the present with a sense of duration, a historical sweep and stretch, we might be able to enjoy the shallows less guiltily, and find ourselves more frequently lost in the depths." Prospect 07/03

Classic Pose - Get Your Picture Done Is there a question anymore about the traditionalist turn art has taken in the past couple of years? "In these times when any visitor to Times Square can sit for an artist whose oeuvre includes fine sketches of Tupac Shakur, James Childs has turned a clever living immortalizing what was once called upper-case-S Society, in a heroic, labor-intensive style you might have thought even more antiquated than Society itself. Working in the formal discipline of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres or John Singer Sargent, Mr. Childs takes about four such commissions a year, for which he charges $150,000 and up for full-length portraits." The New York Times 08/24/03

Read...er...Watch All About It "As technology and programming continue to be refined, the border between artwork and interpretive information will probably blur further. All sorts of boundaries in the arts got blurred or erased beginning in the '60s, with the rise of Pop art, Fluxus, Happenings, earthworks and other innovations. We may be witnessing the erasure of yet one more." San Francisco Chronicle 08/24/03

America-As-Idea - A Flawed Concept The Whitney's "American Effect" show is an idea worth exploring, on its face, writes Blake Gopnik. But there's a fatal flaw in the working out of the idea. "Many, maybe most, of the dozens of brilliant artists working today aren't American, and it's hard to think of a single one of those foreigners whose art, however socially engaged, centers on ideas about America. Of course, that's why none of those artists is in the Whitney show. The exhibition mostly features little-known foreign artists who deserve their lack of recognition." Washington Post 08/24/03

Modern Architecture - A Cautionary Tale Thirty years after it was built (in 1972), Smith College's fine arts center was "uninhabitable." Why did this relatively new building fail to hold up while Smith's other buildings are doing fine after a century? "Before the era of the modern movement, buildings were built in predictable and conventional ways. Builders knew how to build in that manner. Architects didn't ask them to do anything else. But with the arrival of modernism, architects began to invent new kinds of construction. They experimented. A gap opened between the traditional builder and the modernist architect. No longer could the builder correct the architect's mistakes. What happened to Andrews's building is only too typical." Boston Globe 08/23/03

Ft. Lauderdale's New Museum Chief "The new chief of the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, is Irvin Lippman, 55, a man credited with doubling the annual budget and raising attendance at the Columbus, Ohio, art museum over the past eight years." Miami Herald 08/22/03

Munch Treasure Disintegrating "One of Norwegian art history's most important treasures, Edvard Munch's Puberty, is being slowly destroyed. The paint has become so loose on the canvas that it cannot be hung and must be laid flat and covered with a protective cloth." Aftenposten (Norway) 08/21/03

German Observatory Predates Stonehenge The oldest observatory in Europe has been discovered in Germany. It predates Stonehenge. "The site, which is estimated to be around 7,000 years old and measures 75 meters in diameter, provides the first insights into the spiritual and religious worlds of Europe's earliest farmers." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 08/22/03

When The Beirut Museum Was Looted The Baghdad National Museum is not the first to be looted during war. "During Lebanon's tumultuous 15-year civil war, the Beirut National Museum lay in ruins. The museum was hit by artillery shells. Snipers fired from its upper floors, even boring a rifle hole into one of the ancient pieces of art. The fate of its priceless collections was unknown..." Christian Science Monitor 08/21/03

Ancient Roman Vase Might Be Renaissance Product One of the British Museum's most important ancient Roman treasures may have been made in the Renaissance. "The vase is described by the museum as 'the most famous cameo-glass vessel from antiquity' and was a widely accepted to have been made circa 30-20 BC. " BBC 08/21/03

Art To Represent All We Do As A Government Agency The US Interior Department is creating art on a grand scale. "Employing artistic symbolism, the mural is intended to present their missions and activities in terms of Norton's oft-expressed philosophy of arriving at environmental and conservation decisions through "collaboration and cooperation" (i.e., with the help of mining, oil drilling and logging companies). Not even Robert Rauschenberg, with all his glued-together-trash collages, attempted anything so ambitious." Chicago Tribune 08/21/03

Can The Whitney Be Saved? Hilton Kramer writes that the Whitney Museum was founded with high ideals but has sunk to "parlous condition." Kramer wishes new director Adam Weinberg good luck - "he returns to a museum that many artists now despise—for the right reasons, too—and the public has every reason to distrust. I wish him luck. He will certainly need it, if the recent track record of the Whitney’s board of trustees is any guide." New York Observer 08/20/03

Painting - Nothing New Under The Sun In 17,000 Years Picasso, on visiting Lascaux, reportedly remarked that "we have discovered nothing new in art in 17,000 years." NYU professor Randall White writes in a new book that, "all of the major representational techniques were known at least by the Magdalenian [Period, beginning about 18,000 years ago]; oil- and water-based polychrome painting, engraving, bas-relief sculpture, sculpture in the round, charcoal and manganese crayon drawing, molded clay, fired ceramic figurines, shading, perspective drawing, false relief, brush painting, stamping and stenciling." Japan Times 08/17/03

Restoring Frank Lloyd Wright's Legacy Frank Lloyd Wright's most famous house - Fallingwater - is being repaired. But "several of the other approximately 300 remaining single-family Wright houses in this country are far more endangered than Fallingwater: Commissioned by now-octogenarians in desirable areas, their sites, but not their modest-sized rooms, are attractive to affluent buyers who want to replace them with megamansions. Since 2000, the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy has acquired, repaired and resold these Wrights-at-risk." Wall Street Journal 08/20/03

Denver Ponders Museum Building The Denver Art Museum is hoping that its new building, designed by Daniel Libeskind, will become an icon of the city, represent it visually the way the Guggenheim does Bilbao. "But what if the wing is just plain ugly? A number of average citizens and schooled architects wonder if the jarring style represented by Daniel Libeskind's design is more imposition than institution, more trend than truth, more spectacle than service to the community." Denver Post 08/20/03

Artists Try To Recover Work From Bankrupt Dealer "Boston Corporate Art, established in 1987, sold primarily large-scale works to corporations and nonprofit organizations." But the company suddenly went bankrupt earlier this year owing artists thousands of dollars in commissions, and holding hundreds of works of art, which it proposed selling to pay off creditors. This week, artists prowled through the company's art looking to recover their own work...
Boston Herald 08/20/03

Aboriginal Artists Vs. The Prince England's Prince Harry is under fire for some aboriginal images he included in his paintings. "Some of Australia's best-known Aboriginal artists have recently become aware of the prince's paintings of lizard motifs and claim he has stolen their culture. That the artworks have been valued at £15,000 each has compounded the insult to poor desert communities." The Guardian (UK) 08/19/03

• Taking Sides Over Harry "In a farcical way, the row over Prince Harry's art embodies a fundamental worldwide conflict between modernity and religion, the secular and the spiritual. It's a struggle in which the devil - modernity - could do with some better tunes. The case against Harry is not simply that his pictures are a pastiche, in their banally decorative way, of Aboriginal art, but that he has appropriated symbols with specific cultural meanings." The Guardian (UK) 08/20/03

Headless Crime A burglar breaks into a man's house and steals his electronic equipment. But he flees in terror when he discovers what he thinks is a human head floating in a jar. When later speaking to the police, the thief tells of his gruesome discovery. When police go to the scene of the crime they discover... an art project. The Guardian (UK) 08/19/03

Why Nothing's Wright In Baghdad Why were Frank Lloyd Wright's plans for Baghdad not accepted in the 1950s when he drew them up for the King of Iraq? "Wright's plans were deemed 'rather grandiose' by the revolutionary government and were not built. The simpler and cheaper university plan conceived by Gropius was built, as was Gio Ponti's design for a Ministry of Development building. In 1981, a portion of Le Corbusier's design for a sports complex was completed. The building was dedicated as Saddam Hussein Gymnasium." OpinionJournal.com 08/20/03

• Previously: Frank Lloyd Wright's Grand Plan For Baghdad In 1957, the King of Iraq asked architect Frank Lloyd Wright to come up with a grand master plan for Baghdad. "Now, half a century and a 'war of liberation' later, some Islamic scholars think it's time for Iraq to take another look at the American architect's vision for the narrow, sun-bleached streets of low-rise 1950s Baghdad. If built, his plans, which included an opera house, university campus and post and telegraph building, could, they say, do much to disabuse Iraqis of the view that Uncle Sam is intent on erasing Islamic culture." The Guardian (UK) 08/19/03

Taiwan Putting Together Funding For A Guggenheim Taiwan's premier has pledged to cover half the cost of a proposed new Guggenheim Museum in Taichung City, and is considering whether to fund another third of the cost. Taipei Times 08/19/03

The Decline Of The Corporate Collection These are not good times for the corporate art collection. "Many companies - including Reader's Digest, CBS, IBM and Time Warner - sold off expensive collections in the late 1990s when the economy was good and they could turn a profit on the art. Others, such as Chicago-based accounting firm Andersen, have liquidated collections during economic crises. The commitment to corporate art has been shrinking since the boom years of collecting in the 1980s." Chicago Tribune 08/18/03

Is Greek Museum Damaging Artifacts? Greeks are building a museum in Athens they hope will someday house the Elgin Marbles. "But paradoxically, those behind the museum - which is being built to house priceless ancient artefacts - stand accused of destroying many such artefacts in the process. Greek heritage is being lost from the building site, say critics. And the complaints are coming from the Greeks themselves. They are not part of some underhand British plot to scupper the mounting pressure for the return of the marbles within the next 12 months." BBC 08/18/03

The Losing End Of Art "There's nothing like the art market for bringing a glint of piggish excitement to an investor's eye. Trouble is, only the savviest - or luckiest - can hope to make a penny out of it. If you believe what art dealers tell you, times are hard." BBC 08/17/03

Frank Lloyd Wright's Grand Plan For Baghdad In 1957, the King of Iraq asked architect Frank Lloyd Wright to come up with a grand master plan for Baghdad. "Now, half a century and a 'war of liberation' later, some Islamic scholars think it's time for Iraq to take another look at the American architect's vision for the narrow, sun-bleached streets of low-rise 1950s Baghdad. If built, his plans, which included an opera house, university campus and post and telegraph building, could, they say, do much to disabuse Iraqis of the view that Uncle Sam is intent on erasing Islamic culture." The Guardian (UK) 08/19/03

A Turn To The Traditional? Is a new aesthetic of traditional realist art gaining traction? Some "recent surveys show evidence of a very interesting mind shift among a number of young American painters living here or abroad. In general, a broad spectrum of older artists seem almost inevitably to include shock, angst, or politics in their works—an impulse to disturb articulated in The Shock of the New by Robert Hughes. On the other hand, a growing majority of American artists who today are under 40 years old seem more intent on creating paintings that are visually beautiful, rather than emotionally disturbing." NewBohemia 08/03

I'm Feeling All Empty Inside... Toronto, like many cities, is caught up in the big museum-building craze. But what about what goes on inside, wonders Philip Marchand. "For the past 10 years, at least, there has been a drastic decline in such research and expertise in museums throughout Ontario. This decline has hit historical and regional museums the hardest, but it has also affected institutions such as the AGO. Libeskind's Crystal and Gehry's AGO expansion will not solve this problem, and may, in fact, aggravate it." Toronto Star 08/16/03

Damien Hirst, Butterfly Killer Animal rights groups are furious at artist Damien Hirst, who is using the wings of thousands of butterflies for his new project. "The man who made his name sawing up cows, pickling sheep and suspending sharks in tanks of formaldehyde has been busy over the summer plucking the wings off thousands of tropical butterflies. Animal rights activists, who have previously taken a dim view of his stark meditations on life and death, are not amused." The Guardian (UK) 08/16/03

Hooligans Hack Up Public Art In Belgium Vandals have been destroying public arts this summer in Belgium. "Vandals have wrought destruction upon some of Belgium's biggest summer open air art exhibitions, and replacing the damaged exhibits is beyond the funds of many of the organisers of the displays." Expatica 08/14/03

Toledo Museum Names New Director San Diego Museum of Art director Don Bacigalupi has been named director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. Bacigalupi is said to have rejuvenated the San Diego Museum in the four years he has been there. San Diego Union-Tribune 08/13/03

Kramer Discourses Art critic Hilton Kramer expounds on the artworld and reflects on his career as an art critic in a series of audio clips... Among the juicier bits: "Critics who refuse to make judgments...are quickly seen to be... either the whores or the eunuchs of their profession. They may elicit our pity or inspire our contempt, but they can never command our respect..." New Criterion 08/03

Senator Dodd's Quiet Campaign Connecticut senator Senator Christopher J. Dodd is "seeking to correct what he and other lawmakers regard as a longstanding injustice: a dearth of images of women and members of minorities in one of the nation's most visited buildings" - the Capitol. The New York Times 08/13/03

Making Monet Look Like A Hack...But Who Seems To Care? Edinburgh's mamoth Monet show has Richard Dorment wondering if Monet "may not be the most overrated painter of the 19th century. Monet was a virtuoso, like the composer Rossini. Both were prolific with their enormous talents. Ravishing though it is, their work needs to be taken in small doses so that you don't notice how formulaic and repetitive it can be. This sprawling, grab-bag of a show looks at the period 1878-83" and reveals a formula applied over and over again. "So what if the show is lousy? It's Monet, stupid. The box-office queues are long, and the gift shop is busy. The cynicism of the whole enterprise boggles the mind." The Telegraph (UK) 08/13/03

Historic UK Building Material At An End - Preservationists Fret The British government has decided not to allow a lime quarry to operate, thereby effectively ending "production of traditional lime mortar in the UK and a history stretching back to the Romans. Made by burning lime in kilns, it was used on most buildings erected before 1800. Without a homegrown source, some fear that builders and enthusiastic amateurs will use cement as an alternative for repairs, causing damage to historic brick and stonework." The Guardian (UK) 08/12/03

Artist Wants To Rebuild Berlin Wall A German artist wants to rebuild the Berlin Wall in plastic. He's been "working for three years to raise the €25m (£18m) he says it will take to rebuild a 29-mile plastic copy of the Berlin Wall across the city." He hopes to build it in time for when the city hosts the World Cup in 2006. The Guardian (UK) 08/12/03

Julian Schnabel - Gone Before His Time Once Julian Schnabel was hot. Now not... "Everything Julian Schnabel does has only one meaning: it's over. The story of American art that seemed so epic, so inexhaustible, from Jackson Pollock in the 1940s to Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark in the 1970s, is over. How can a culture become so creative so suddenly, and then, as suddenly, dry up? You have to admire Schnabel's cojones for carrying on at all, so ruthlessly has he been expunged from the memory of the art world." The Guardian (UK) 08/12/03

The Preservation Problem Preservation of contemporary art is a huge concern. "High-tech art is at risk of literally fading away, leaving buyers with nothing to show for their money. Time is running out for museums, galleries and private collectors wanting to preserve their digital photography and video art, as recent research has shown that the deterioration is quicker than people realised. Institutions around the world are tackling this problem, and scientists at Basel University have been researching stability in photography since 1965." Financial Times 08/12/03

Plans Line Up For WTC Site "At last month's deadline, some 5,200 designs for the 9/11 memorial cascaded into the Lower Manhattan Development Corp., submitted by architects, artists and amateurs alike. The proposals are now being pared down by the jury--a distinguished panel that includes Maya Lin, architect of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, and Vartan Gregorian, former head of the New York Public Library. They'll have their work cut out for them. The program for the competition is of baffling complexity..." OpinionJournal.com 08/12/03

Can New Vinoly Building Help Nasher Forget Its Past? Duke University's Nasher Museum is working towards a new home designed by a star architect. But will the new $23 million building wipe away the museum's troubled history? Weekly Independent (North Carolina) 08/11/03

Scotland's Magnificent New Parliament Edinburgh's new Scottish Parliament building is under construction. "It is a glorious design, but derided by the press for being costly and late. True, its cost has risen from a nominal £10m at the time it was first seriously mooted in 1997, to £40m when its design was approved, to £100m when its scale was tripled, to £300m more recently, and to £345m today. This is a lot of money - but what a building." The Guardian (UK) 08/11/03

Treasure Bazaar "These days, the crisis of looting in Iraq has brought the freewheeling world of art smuggling into the spotlight. But long before the turmoil in Baghdad, the clandestine art market had established itself as a multi-billion-dollar international business. By some estimates it ranks in profitability right after the illegal market for arms and drugs. In Italy, as in Iraq, layers of civilization have graced the landscape with a seemingly unending supply of salable treasures. " Washington Post 08/11/03

A Frame Is A... What difference does it make what frame is put around a painting? A great deal of difference, it appears... Washington Post 08/10/03

Defending The Vision Daniel Libeskind is fighting for his ideas at the World Trade Center site. "The revisions. The redesigning. The new studies. The jockeying. Not just an architect, Libeskind has emerged as a tough defender of his vision, amid the high stakes tug of war that threatens to pick his design apart. Sometimes he wins. Sometimes he loses. And the battle is far from over. " Washington Post 09/10/03

Building A Worse Chicago Is Chicago architecture going to the dogs? "Chicago long has enjoyed a reputation as a city that superbly balances the demands of business and the art of architecture, but the present building boom - the nation's largest surge of high-rise residential construction - is throwing that balance grotesquely out of whack. Wherever you glance these days - on either side of North Michigan Avenue, just west of South Lake Shore Drive, or along the Chicago River - you are apt to see a towering construction crane, to hear the whir of a cement mixer and to exclaim, 'What went wrong'?" Chicago Tribune 08/10/03

Bard - A Building That Swoops Down On You Robert Campbell notes that Frank Gehry's new much-praised performing arts center at Bard College marks a new turn in the architect's evolution. "What strikes you right away about the Fisher is how casual, how thrown-together it looks. It's basically a building of three or four cubes made of glass, concrete, and stucco, with a shiny blanket of stainless steel thrown over them as if to protect them from the rain. The blanket falls over the cubes in a billow of curves, as loose and free as if it had landed accidentally. The only place where it takes a definite shape is at the main entrance, where it swoops down like a monk's hood to shade and protect visitors as they enter, or as they stand outside for an intermission." Boston Globe 08/10/03

So Caligula Really Was Mad... "British and American archaeologists digging in the Roman Forum said yesterday they had uncovered evidence to suggest that the emperor Caligula really was a self-deifying megalomaniac, and not the misunderstood, if eccentric, ruler that modern scholars have striven to create." The Guardian (UK) 08/09/03

Is Art The Best Investment? "In a recent survey investors ranked art second only to property as the best place to park one's hard earned cash. But just like any other asset it might not turn a profit." CNN.com 08/08/03

Edinburgh's Hottest Show... The hottest show in Edinburgh this summer? It's a show that's not part of the Edinburgh Festival or the Fringe Festival. It's the blockbuster Monet show at the National Galleries of Scotland, which is seeing record numbers of visitors as the Monet show opens. The Scotsman 08/07/03

The Whitney's New Director Adam Weinberg is the new director of the Whitney Museum. "Weinberg, who has been director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., since 1999, is no stranger to the Whitney. He has worked there twice before, most recently as a senior curator. He succeeds Maxwell L. Anderson, who resigned under fire in May." The New York Times 08/08/03

Record Crowds At Australian National Gallery Australia's new National Gallery of Victoria is a big hit with crowds. "About 1.5 million people have visited the Potter Centre in its first nine months." The gallery is so popular and "donors are so keen to be part of the action they have contributed more than $70 million under three different schemes in the past four years - a record for Victoria, if not the country." The Age (Melbourne) 08/08/03

Should National Gallery Be Concerned About Digital Piracy? The movie and music industries are warning London's National Gallery that the museum's digitization project is an open invitation to image piracy. "The National Gallery has been working with computer giant Hewlett-Packard for eight years on a scheme to digitise all of its 2300 paintings. The images have been captured with a digital camera that steps backwards and forwards over the painting, a technique that improves the resolution of the image to 100 megapixels, 20 times that of the best consumer cameras. When someone places an order, a six-colour printer in the gallery's shop will print out a high-quality copy in just five minutes. The gallery hopes to generate extra revenue by allowing accredited print shops around the world to sell copies as well." New Scientist 08/07/03

Weinberg To Head Whitney? "Adam D. Weinberg, director of the Addison Gallery of American Art at Phillips Academy in Andover [Massachusetts], is expected to be named the new director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York at a Whitney board meeting tonight, according to a museum-world source close to the search... Whitney directors have had notorious difficulties with the post. The last director, Maxwell L. Anderson, resigned in May after disputes with the board. Anderson's predecessor, David A. Ross, who was director of Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art before going to the Whitney in 1991, left in 1998 to head the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art." Boston Globe 08/07/03

Antiquities Game - Is It All Stolen? Oscar Muscarella believes that most of the antiquities in museums like the Metropolitan Museum are plundered. "Whether this should all be returned or not is another story. Put simply, his view is that the practice of acquiring antiquities, outside of scholarly excavation, is inevitably immoral. It promotes a trade that Muscarella, during his more animated outbursts, likens to 'white slavery'." he believes that "the important thing now is to stop the looting." The Village Voice 08/05/03

Harvard's Substandard Museums Rumors are swirling about the coming layoffs at Harvard University's art museums, but Christine Temin points out that staff cuts are only a symptom of a larger sickness. "The university had already canceled plans for a major new riverside museum designed by Renzo Piano and lost a great director, James Cuno, to London's Courtauld Institute. It has also put plans for a multimillion-dollar overhaul of the Fogg on hold until a new director arrives and starts a capital campaign. The Fogg's galleries aren't even climate-controlled, which makes it difficult to impossible to borrow works from other museums." Boston Globe 08/06/03

Bringing Some Clout To The Art Repatriation Fight "A British peer is in Vienna to try to persuade Austrian authorities to return a £10m painting stolen from a British family by the Nazis." Lord Janner of Braunstone's trip to Vienna is the latest salvo in his crusade to shame the Austrians into returning the Egon Schiele painting to its pre-WWII owners, who fled the country in 1938. Austrian law compels the government to turn over all such artworks which are publicly held, but Lord Janner claims that the government is using "cheating, fraudulent, disgraceful" tactics to sidestep the law. BBC 08/06/03

Lightening Up On Video Richard Dorment is enchanted by a new show of video art. In the 60s, he writes, video art opened up new possibilities for artists. "Art lightened up. Short video pieces could be funny, impromptu, sexy or apparently inconsequential - and yet be serious works of art. And whether artists worked behind the closed door of their studios or in a public gallery, the range of subject matter they could explore expanded dramatically. Nudity, eroticism, humour, physical endurance, and relationships between people - video enabled artists to treat all these themes with a new immediacy, informality and spontaneity." The Telegraph (UK) 08/06/03

Why No Art At Edinburgh Festival? As a major Monet show opens in Edinburgh, visual arts enthusiasts protest the exclusion of visual art from the popular Edinburgh Festival. "The medium has served a 12-year exile from the cultural extravaganza and many leading Scottish gallery figures believe a change is long overdue given the success of festivals in other genres such as books and films." The Scotsman 08/05/03

A Monet Show To Die For Is the new exhibition of Monet opening in Edinburgh this week - after years of "wining, dining and bamboozling some of the world's richest collectors" - really "the most intense Monet exhibition there has ever been"? It's certainly the largest Monet show in the UK ever outside of London "It is two canvasses short of the 79 shown at the Royal Academy in London in 1999, when 813,000 paid to see Monet's water lilies." The Guardian (UK) 08/05/03

Van Gogh On Film? Film had scarcely been invented by 1890 when Van Gogh committed suicide. But some Dutch filmmakers claim to have a snippet of film of the artist. "The Van Gogh film will be shown in his native village of Zundert next Saturday as part of celebrations marking the 150th year of his birth, even though the record of Van Gogh's work and the lack of other evidence appeared to cast doubt on the claim that a grainy passer-by in the film was the brilliant but troubled painter." USA Today 08/04/03

• Questions About Van Gogh Film "The Van Gogh film will be shown in his native village of Zundert next Saturday as part of celebrations marking the 150th year of his birth, even though the record of Van Gogh's work and the lack of other evidence cast doubt on the claim that a grainy passer-by in the film was the painter." The Guardian (UK) 08/05/03

• Experts: Van Gogh Movie A Fake A film purported to be footage of artist Vincent Van Gogh is a fake, says experts. After investigations, the festival organisation in the Netherlands that planned to show the movie - Autour de Vincent, "confirmed the footage was a hoax designed to gain publicity for the weekend event. The Brabant provincial government was aware of the stunt and had partially funded it." Expatica 08/05/03

Ear's Something Revolting A British artist plans to use plastic surgery to graft a human ear grown in a biotech lab onto his forearm. "Even in an art world used to the antics of Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst, the Extra Ear project will cause upset. Many critics of unusual modern art say a fringe of the movement is caught in an 'arms race' of stunts that have little artistic merit but plenty of shock value. Last month a French artist cut off his own finger with an axe and donated it to a museum." The Observer (UK) 08/03/03

British Museum: Absolute No To Returning Parthenon Marbles The British Museum has categorically rejected sending the Parthenon Marbles to Greece for the Olympic Games. "Having for years resisted discussing the issue, the museum's new director, Neil McGregor, told the Greek minister of culture that, as one of a handful of 'universal, world institutions', the British Museum was the best place for them." The Guardian (UK) 08/04/03

Libeskind's WTC Is A Project For An Orchestra Is Daniel Libeskind getting edged out of the WTC project. No, writes Justin Davidson. Hiring Santiago Calatrava to design part of Libeskind's vision is inspired. "If Libeskind is the great enshriner of memory, Calatrava is a poet of forward motion. His best buildings seem to be poised in the instant before taking flight. Straining yet serene, as fast and frozen as a comic book swoosh, they look like icons of weightlessness. Almost a century ago, a group of Italian artists-ideologues who called themselves the Futurists published a polemic in which they declared 'that the splendor of the world has been enriched with new forms of beauty, the beauty of speed.' The Futurists approved of little, but they might have loved Calatrava." Newsday 08/05/03

Does America Need An African-American Museum? "The U.S. Senate recently authorized the start-up of a national museum of African-American history and culture that would be part of the Smithsonian Institution and located on the Mall. This seems a very good thing for our nation, although no one has mentioned that a separate museum might seem to replicate the very segregation that the museum is meant to decry. Wouldn’t matters be better served in providing a 'true' picture of American history and in understanding African-American 'contributions' to American culture, as the official cant goes, if the story was fused with the main national narrative?" Newsweek 07/31/03

The Tally At Iraq's National Museum What artwork is actually missing from the Iraq National Museum? "American and Iraqi investigators last week released a 'most wanted' list showing 30 priceless antiquities still missing from the museum’s main collection, along with some 13,000 other pieces. (No, they’re not printed up as playing cards.) Over the past couple of months, Iraqi museum staff, experts at the British Museum in London and U.S. investigators, have discussed the thefts in detail with Newsweek reporters. While some of the picture is still vague and the true culprits still can’t quite be identified, the fog is slowly lifting." Newsweek 07/31/03

Revenge Of The Teenage Art Gangs Teenage art gangs seem to be hip right now. "These days the very youngest and hippest American collectives all seem to come from Rhode Island, namely groups such as Forcefield and Dearraindrop. These are apparently two distinctly different organisations who happen to share the same provincial bohemia and a not dissimilar anarchic aesthetic of extreme visual and sonic overload; what’s more their combined ages probably add up to just one mid-career abstract painter." The Art Newspaper 08/01/03

Milwaukee: The Calatrava Effect How's the Milwaukee Art Museum doing since opening its new Calatrava building last year? "Our annual expenses since the Calatrava addition opened have gone up by about $3 million - and so has income, by a like amount. Membership is up from 13,000 members before the expansion to 30,000 now; admissions are running at 360,000 visitors a year, or double levels before the expansion; annual donations and a successful museum store account for the rest." Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel 08/02/03

Fool's Gold "A gold bar at the National Museum of American History, long thought to be a sample from the 19th century California Gold Rush, is a fake, according to a well-known geologist. Bob Evans, the scientist who examined the five-ounce bar, said the ingot is indeed gold but was not made in 1857, the date stamped on it. He said it was probably made in the 1950s and was purchased unknowingly by Josiah K. Lilly, the pharmaceutical industry executive who willed his enormous collection of gold coins to the Smithsonian in 1968... the museum will move the two bars into a section of the coin exhibit that deals with counterfeiting." Washington Post 08/02/03

The Ownership Conundrum Museums are not generally in the habit of acquiring stolen goods intentionally. But in the long, shady history of public and private art acquisition, countless works of art may come to a museum with little in the way of a paper trail. Most museums accept such works without question, and proceed to claim them as having been legitimately acquired. But with the drive to 'repatriate' artworks looted by Nazis gathering steam, and governments fighting over ownership of cultural artifacts, museums are increasingly under pressure to take an active role in stemming the unchecked flow of stolen antiquities. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is currently on the horns of just such a dilemma. The New York Times 08/02/03

Bringing Art To Mass Transit It was nearly 50 years ago when the city of Minneapolis tore up one of the most extensive streetcar systems in the world, in return for a one-time payoff from the auto industry. Now, with traffic reaching crisis levels, the city is spending millions to build a single new light rail line, a project which is viewed as a long-overdue public good by some, and a money-sucking folly by others. In an effort to make the rail line a desirable method of travel for a populace used to climbing into SUVs for their daily commute, the station stops are being designed by local artists and architects with an eye to reflecting their surroundings. In particular, the station rising outside the MetroDome in downtown Minneapolis is "rich with symbolic references to the site's past." Minneapolis Star Tribune 08/03/03

Harvard Museums Brace For Layoffs "Employees of the Harvard University art museums are bracing for a round of cuts as the museums try to shrink a projected operating-budget deficit of almost $1.5 million. Workers were told by memo last week that layoffs would be part of a larger plan to balance the budget." No one is talking in hard numbers yet, and museum administrators have criticized a student paper for hyping the layoffs, but with more than 70% of the museum budgets funded by endowment funds, which have been hard-hit by the continuing economic slump, few expect the staff cuts will be minor. Boston Globe 08/02/03

The Universe Revolves Around... Maine? Nearly everyone spent at least some amount of time as a student cobbling together some sort of dubious model of our solar system for science class. But in rural Maine, residents have taken such projects to a whole new level. "A community endeavor four years in the making before its completion in June, the Maine Solar System Model is a three-dimensional roadside scale model of the solar system, stretching from the Northern Maine Museum of Science in Presque Isle 40 miles southward to the hamlet of Houlton. The scale is 93 million to 1." The sun is represented by a huge mural at the museum, whereas Pluto is a 1-inch diameter ball, in accordance with proper scaling. Boston Globe 08/02/03