July 20, 2007 10:57

Talk About Bad Timing

From The Art Newspaper comes this story. At the very time that Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli has been fighting to reclaim Italian antiquities from American museums, an Italian conservation group called Italia Nostra is in court attempting to block the repatriation to Libya of a second century Roman statue of Venus that's currently on display at the Palazzo Massimo museum in Rome. The statue was removed by Italian troops in Libya in 1912, at a time when Libya was a colony of Italy. (The latest edition of ArtNews, which contained an item on the story, puts the year at 1915. In any case, Libya was a colony from 1911 to 1942.)

The Art Newspaper fails to make clear something ArtNews points out. Italia Nostra is a private organization. But the Italian government has agreed to return the statue. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi issued a decree to that effect in 2002, thirteen years after Libya first requested return of the statue. It was that decree that eventually sent Italia Nostra to court to block the repatriation. A judge ruled in April that the statue must go back. And Culture Minister Rutelli issued a statement soon after that called the court's decision "a useful precedent" for his own efforts to retrieve Italian treasures that "other states have looted from us."

Italia Nostra is now appealing the lower court verdict, which means the case is being kicked up to Italy's highest administrative tribunal. According to ArtNews, the conservative daily Il Tempo has suggested that in exchange for giving back the statue the Italian government should seek some "counterpart action" from the Libyans. As an example some archeologists have suggested that Italy should ask for the return of the Arco dei Fileni, "a Fascist-era triumphal arch built in the desert, which Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi dismantled in 1973."

You would think that might be the kind of thing the Italians would just as soon forget about.

July 19, 2007 3:02

More on Marbles in Motion

Figure of a River God, from the west pediment of the Parthenon —  © Trustees of the British Museum

I'm just back from a small press lunch with Dimitris Pandermalis, who heads the Organization for the Construction of the New Acropolis Museum, and Bernard Tschumi, the architect of the new museum, which is nearing completion at the foot of the Acropolis. The museum will house the Parthenon marbles that remain in the possession of Greece, but as everybody knows it's most provocative feature will be the galleries — partly empty galleries — designed expressly to hold the statuary that's not in Greece. What that means, chiefly, is the Elgin Marbles that have been in the possession of the British Museum since 1816, when the British government bought them from that crafty Scotsman Lord Elgin.

This is called architecture as moral pressure. The Elgin Marbles — meaning large parts of the Parthenon's frieze, 15 metopes and numerous pediment sculptures — were sawed off and carted away by Lord Elgin and his subordinates in the first years of the 19th century, long before the 1970 UNESCO agreement that established a (somewhat) effective legal regime to regulate the export of antiquities. As a consequence, the Greeks, who want them back, have no real legal remedies at their disposal. (This is one way that the Elgin marbles differ from the antiquities being pursued by Italian Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli. What he's been going after from American museums is work that he believes was unlawfully acquired after 1939, the cut off year specified by the UNESCO agreement for the export of antiquities without permission.) So what the Greeks have opted for instead is a series of galleries designed (for now) partly as a series of gaping holes. Which, as a way to leverage public opinion, may be more effective than a courtroom if they work it right.

The museum, which was originally supposed to be completed in time for the Athens Olympics in 2004, will be getting a slow motion launch that starts early next year. The collections won't be fully installed until the end of 2008, but the public will be admitted into the museum as the installations are underway.

Here are a few data points from the lunch:

1. Pandermalis made it clear that — eventually — the Greeks will seek the return of all statuary related to the Parthenon, meaning not just the Elgins, which are by far the largest score, but the portion of the frieze that's presently in the Louvre, and the smaller fragments in Copenhagen, Palermo and elsewhere.

2. As we get closer to the official opening of the museum late next year, pressure will likely build for the British Museum to take part in a loan show to send the Elgin Marbles temporarily to Athens to allow them to be seen for the first time in centuries in the company of the other Parthenon marbles. In May there was a fascinating exchange of feelers via the media between British Museum Director Neil McGregor and lower ranking Greek cultural functionaries about the — still very hypothetical — possibility of the Brits "lending" the marbles to Greece if the Greeks would acknowledge that the trustees of the British Museum are the owners. That's a big if, but it was an unusual exchange, and surely McGregor made his comments, first made I believe to Bloomberg News, with the prospect of that Athens museum show in his mind.

As for Tschumi's museum, it looks promising, but I try to resist the temptation to comment on buildings I haven't visited. Here's a look.

Rendering of the New Acropolis Museum — © 2007 Bernard Tschumi Architects

July 18, 2007 11:57

Make It Real (Or Just Forget About It)

We're having a big week in the art attribution field. First there was the Italian conservator who decided that a canvas she's been examining, and which has long been considered a copy of a Caravaggio, is the real thing.

Then there was the mysterious canvas sold at auction last week in Leicestershire, England. At the time it was represented as an 18th century portrait of a man by an anonymous artist and offered at the anybody-can-afford-this estimate of $300 to $400. The auctioneers should have known something was different about this lot when inexplicably fierce bidding pushed the final price to $410,000, a sum that reportedly left the astonished seller very happy. But maybe not for long. This week the British papers report that the canvas may actually be a Titian, something those competing bidders obviously knew. Possible market value: $10 million.

Portrait of a Man (detail), Attribution pending

But the best story comes out of the U.S., where a London-based film maker has filed suit in a New York court against the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. That's the organization that, among other things, directs people who think they own a Warhol to the Andy Warhol Art Authentication Board, which in turn examines would be Warhols to determine whether they're "real" Warhols, the kind you can sell for real Warhol prices. The film maker, Joe Simon-Whelan, has been at war with the Board for years after they twice rejected a purported 1964 Warhol self-portrait that Simon-Whelan bought in 1989 for $195,000.

Simon-Whelan accuses the Board of acting fraudulently to keep the pool of authenticated Warhols artificially small, which would keep prices high for the recognized Warhols, many of which the Foundation owns and sometimes sells. Well, keeping the pool of an artist's work smaller than it might otherwise be is the inevitable byproduct of any authentication board's work. There are a lot fewer acknowledged Rembrandts in the world today then there were before the Rembrandt Research Project started combing through his output 39 years ago.

So the main hurdle for Simon-Whelan will be to prove that the Board has acted "fraudulently." At the very least, if the court decides that his claim has enough substance to bring the suit to trial, it will be interesting to learn more about just how the Board authenticates work by an artist whose whole philosophy revolved around mass production of imagery and the elimination of the artist's unique touch. Is a Warhol silk screen less authentic if he went to the bathroom and left Gerard Malanga to pull the page? What if he didn't even show up at the Factory that day? As Andy himself once said: "If someone faked my art, I couldn't identify it."

I can't wait til they form The Damien Hirst Authentication Board.

July 17, 2007 11:57

Frank Stella: The Artist as Architect

Constantini Museum (Model), 1999 — Photo: Steven Sloman; Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society

I finally caught up last week with the pair of Frank Stella shows at the Metropolitan Museum. The larger of the two, Painting Into Architecture, is closing July 29. I think I put it on the back burner partly because of a mostly negative review from Roberta Smith in the New York Times, a review that I now think missed the point, at least of the architectural work. (The smaller show of Stella sculpture on the roof of the Met is another matter.)

Though Stella has qualified for decades as one of the best known American painters, not many people are aware that he's also had a serious interest for many years in architecture. He's made a number of architectural proposals, mostly on commission, all of them so far unbuilt. The Met show consists largely of models and large scale mock ups of those designs.

It was Santiago Calatrava who said "a building is a sculpture you walk into." Which is why the artist-architect was a combination that used to be taken for granted. Michelangelo, Sansovino and Bernini are the obvious examples. By the 19th century the gradual professionalization of architecture had pretty much pushed artists out of the field, though you can still find the occasional architect like Calatrava who also makes (inert, prosaic) sculpture. Hey, Sansovino, a good architect, was a mediocre sculptor, too.

Maybe the closest we come now to the artist-architect is Frank Gehry, who likes to think of himself as a kind of sculptor. (Even if Richard Serra has said publicly that it's presumptuous of Gehry to think of himself that way.) But it turns out that Stella has been designing structures for almost 20 years. In the late 1990s he produced a really interesting scheme for a gallery and park in Buenos Aires. (That's the one pictured up top.) And his scheme for a series of pavilions along curving paths, an unbuilt commission for a culture park in Dresden....

First Model, Kunsthalle Dresden, 1991 — Photo: Steven Sloman; Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society

......served as inspiration for "Da Monsta", the visitor center that Philip Johnson designed for the grounds of his Glass House.

Da Monsta, Philip Johnson — Photo: Paul Warchol

Gehry also once asked Stella to design a gatehouse for the Peter Lewis estate outside Cleveland that Gehry worked on for years, though none of it was ever built.

Gate House (Model), 1994 — Photo: Steven Sloman; Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society

In her review in the Times, Roberta Smith objected that Stella's looping, contorted models didn't appear to be inhabitable. "First of all because there is not much to walk on."

Point taken. That's true, for instance, of his proposal for a guest house that looks like a sculpture by Tony Smith. (Who, of course, started out as an architect, so Stella could be said to be bringing Smith's architectonic sculpture back to its point of origin.)

Guest House (model), 2007 — Photo: Steven Sloman; Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society

But Stella's models are works in progress, meant to propose a rethinking of space that can then be worked up into a buildable form — a common practice among architects looking for new points of departure. (And Stella was working for years with an engineer from Ove Arup, the well known engineering firm, to arrive at buildable versions of his ideas.) The important thing, I think, is that he was putting out there new ways of thinking about architectural space, and space is something artists work with in the most radical ways. (Though granted, in this era of rapid and radical rethinking about architcture, not all of Stella's ideas look that new. His proposal for a curving metal bandshell that's currently under construction in Cherbourg, France bears more than a passing resemblance to the bandshell Gehry designed for Millenium Park in Chicago. Which design came first I don't know.)

In the small catalogue to this show, Paul Goldberger locates Stella's intentions in just the right way when he says this. "What Stella really wants, I suspect, is to have the artist be a kind of agent provocateur, stimulating archictects to rise above the mundane." Precisely because architects like Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid and so on have moved so far from the orthogonal box, and because computer assisted design can do so much to make unlikely designs a buildable reality, now is a perfect time for artists to get back seriously into architecture.

I'll let Stella have the last word, from a talk he gave at the Architectural League of New York in 1994: "I think that many gestures artists make, gestures that seem casual and improbable but surprisingly effective in making art, can be made available to architecture."

Bernini could not have put it better.

July 16, 2007 12:46

And Speaking of Modernist Teardowns

Not long ago I ran a piece in Time about the threat of demolition faced by Modernist houses around the country, with houses designed by Paul Rudolph as being for some reason a particular target lately. Today I get some related news from my colleague Carolina Miranda, who's in Florida looking into work of the Sarasota School that Rudolph was a part of at the outset of his career. A few days ago she made it over to see a house from 1941 that was designed by Sarasota School founder Ralph Twitchell in collaboration with Rudolph. But it turns out that the bulldozers got there just before she did.

The irony here is that the house had been purchased by Joe King, a local architect who has co-written a book on Rudolph's houses and who hoped to preserve it. Then came the horrendous repair bills to make it insurable. Karrie Jacobs, who blogs for House and Garden, has the background.

July 13, 2007 11:39

A Shark's Tale

Damien Hirst's pickled shark, formally known as The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, has been presented as a three year loan by its owner, the hedge fund billionaire Steven A. Cohen, to no less a grand lady than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

And to think, this is the same Met whose trustees used to be touchy —granted, it was long ago — about admitting Picassos into the collection.

Anyway, a post script. In his piece for Bloomberg News that I've linked to above, Martin Gayford notes that the same Damien Hirst is asking 50 million pounds — $100 million — for his new diamond encrusted skull. He goes on to describe Hirst as....

"...a contemporary artist, still in early middle age, whose works now command higher prices than those of Raphael and Velazquez....At a recent auction in London, a Velazquez went for a mere 8.4 million pounds and a Raphael for 18 million pounds.

Command? If by that Gayford means gets, then he's making the same mistake I've noticed some other writers making when they discuss the Hirst skull. He's treating the thing as though its $100 million asking price has already been paid. Maybe eventually it will be. There's no shortage of persuadable zillionaires out there. But for now that price is just a price tag, a shrewd publicity stunt, and one that seems to be paying off.

In which case, when I put my old Honda on the market, I think I'll ask $40 million. That way it'll command more than a Raphael. But hey, it's a lot newer. And what Raphael comes with air bags?

July 12, 2007 4:50

The Wright Stuff

Fallingwater/Frank Lloyd Wright, 1937

I made a trip last weekend to Fallingwater, the Frank Lloyd Wright house about an hour’s drive outside Pittsburgh. There wasn’t any news-related reason. I just wanted to see the thing while I still had my visit to the Philip Johnson Glass House fresh in my mind. In their different ways both houses were crucial to the American understanding of Modernism in the last century. I won’t data dump my notebook here, but there are one or two things worth saying.

I like something I found in Fallingwater Rising, Franklin Toker's definitive book. He's trying to explain Fallingwater's role in getting Americans to warm towards Modernism.

The key was the way Wright had presented European themes in a muscular, down to earth, American manner. The International Style showcased industrial materials, but Fallingwater accentuated its natural components. The International Style shrouded itself in the bland anonymity of smooth transparent surfaces; Fallingwater presented itself instead with robust walls that were strongly colored and textured.

To say the least, Wright had a fraught relationship with the European Modernists like Mies and Le Corbusier. They owed alot to his rethinking of architectural space, a debt they generally acknowledged. But they had moved on to a radically distilled Modernism that left him cold. He's supposed to have said that with Fallingwater he planned "to beat them at their own game." And what you recognize once you get there is that in some ways he did.

With this house Wright deconstructed architectural form into planes as radically as anything that Mies did with the Barcelona Pavilion. But he built with warmer materials, stone and painted concrete, as if to prove that Modernism could have a human face. This is exactly the effort that a lot of later architects would make as they tried to find ways to warm up that glass and steel box that Modernism had squeezed architecture into.

And in particular, this is what Philip Johnson, the architect of the Glass House, would spend a lot of his own career attempting. The Glass House, which Johnson finished 12 years after the completion of Fallingwater, was his way of showing that, as a matter of fact, the most reductive glass and steel Modernism could be very beautiful too. (Take that, Frank!) But we know that even as he was building it, Johnson was thinking about how to bring certain values back into architecture that Modernism had squeezed out, like historical reference — values that Wright had managed to incorporate into Fallingwater. You could say that in the conceptual space that separates Fallingwater from the Glass House, any number of the core issues of 20th century architecture would be played out.

The Glass House/Philip Johnson, 1949 — Photo: National Trust for Historic Preservation.

July 11, 2007 1:42

The Italian Stallion

Victorious Youth, Greek, 300-100 B.C. — Photo: Getty Museum

Things are getting serious here. Francesco Rutelli, the Italian culture minister who has been on the warpath over looted antiquities, abruptly issued an ultimatum yesterday to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Return everything we demand by the end of the month or Italy will impose "an embargo" on the Getty. Meaning "an end to cultural and scientific collaboration." Meaning, presumably, an end to everything from scholarly exchanges to archeological digs.

If you've just joined this game in mid-play, here's a quick summary of the action so far. Italy wants the Getty to return more than 40 ancient works. The Getty was prepared to agree to the return of 26, but that agreement fell through when Rutelli also demanded return of the so-called Getty Bronze. A Greek statue of a victorious athlete dating from around the third century B.C., it was fished out of international waters near Italy in 1964. It now happens to be one of the star attractions of the Getty Villa in Malibu, where it has its own gallery. The Getty insists that the Italian claim on the bronze boy is invalid, since it was found in international waters. The Italians counter that it was brought briefly onto Italian soil and illegally exported from there. I stopped by the Getty Villa a few months ago to pay it what I knew might be a farewell visit. It's a piece worth fighting over.

Bad enough that the Getty already faces the possibility that it may have to return another sizeable work, a fifth century B.C. Greek statue, possibly of Aphrodite, that the Italians say was looted from Sicily. (And which is the centerpiece of another Getty gallery.) Though the Getty has already expressed its willingness to transfer title to the statue now, the museum has also embarked on a series of researches into the statue's origins that it doesn't expect to complete until November. Which is a lot later than the end of this month. And of course, Marion True, the Getty's former curator of antiquities, is still endlessly on trial in Italy for her purported role in acquiring Italian treasures improperly.

The people at the Getty may have been taken by surprise by Rutelli's outburst, but they continue to insist that they're optimistic. About two weeks ago Rutelli and Michael Brand, the director of the Getty, exchanged letters that were described to me today by Ron Hartwig, a Getty spokesman, as "very cordial".

"We are hopeful," Hartwig said, "that with this communication channel now re-opened we can proceed towards an agreement."

That may be. But there is still no date set for the next actual meeting between representatives of the Getty and the Italian culture ministry. And for now it sounds like there's only kind of agreement Rutelli will settle for.

What's the Italian for capitulation?

July 10, 2007 1:25

The Problem with Postmodernism

I wrote a quick tribute yesterday to the late, great MoMA photo curator John Szarkowski. Today I got a comment worth highlighting from an important American photographer, Tod Papageorge, whose thoughts are of special interest because he's one of the artists who works in the complex idiom that Szarkowski championed and clarified for the rest of us. I'll call it, imperfectly, subjective street photography, though nearly all photography is to some degree subjective and this kind doesn't have to take place in the streets. Passing Through Eden, the book Papageorge published this year, contains 25 years worth of pictures made in New York's Central Park. And his next book, American Sports, 1970, which Aperture will publish next January, was shot in ballparks and stadiums.

Here's Tod:

It IS impossible, at this point, to understand how profoundly [Szarkowski] shaped several generations of photographers, and even the rise of the art/photography gallery. Those Postmodernists you mention owe their very studios to John's great influence as a eloquent promulgator of the notion of photography as an independent art--a fact that might surprise many of them even as it must have rankled John.

For years Papageorge has headed the graduate program in photography at the Yale School of Art. (Along the way he also managed to produce one of the most illuminating books about photography I ever read: Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence.) His little dig there at Postmodernism reminded me that last fall, in an interview with the omni-competent arts journalist Richard B. Woodward in Bomb, Papageorge offered a useful take on the problem with photographers who conceive a picture first, then construct it.

I think now that, in general—and this includes a lot of what I see in Chelsea even more than what I see from students at Yale—there's a failure to understand how much richer in surprise and creative possibility the world is for photographers in comparison to their imagination. This is an understanding that an earlier generation of students, and photographers, accepted as a first principle. Now ideas are paramount, and the computer and Photoshop are seen as the engines to stage and digitally coax those ideas into a physical form—typically a very large form. This process is synthetic, and the results, for me, are often emotionally synthetic too.

Sure, things have to change, but photography-as-illustration, even sublime illustration, seems to me an uninteresting direction for the medium to be tracking now, particularly at such a difficult time in the general American culture. All in all, I think that there's as much real discovery and excitement in the digital videos that my students at Yale are making as there is in the still photography I see either there or in New York, perhaps because the video camera, like the 35 mm camera 30 years ago, can be carried everywhere, and locks onto the shifting contradictions and beauties of the world more directly and unselfconsciously than many photographers now seem to feel still photography can, or should, do.

You can find the full interview here.

Final irony — At Yale Papageorge has counted among his students a number —  including Gregory Crewdson, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Anna Gaskell and Katy Grannan — who have gone on to become very well known as practitioners of the staged photography that Papageorge doesn't care for much. (Or in the case of Grannan and diCorcia, whose ingenious conflations of fiction and document I do like, maybe a better term would be "semi-staged".) What can you do? Sometimes the kids just don't grow up like the parents.

Central Park, 1981. Photo: Tod Papageorge/Courtesy of Pace MacGill Gallery

July 9, 2007 1:59

John Szarkowski: 1925-2007

Today comes news of the death of John Szarkowski, MoMA's great former chief curator of photography, a man whose influence over the field was immense. In his 29 years at MoMA, Szarkowski put his stamp decisively on the art and taste of his time simply by pointing to a few crucial photographers and saying attention must be paid. It was Szarkowski who understood — early and profoundly — how important it was that Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander were moving the practice of documentary "towards more personal ends". He also understood that their pictures were as intricate and illuminating as any art of their time.

Szarkowski wasn't indifferent to conventional documentary photography, the kind that focuses on social reportage. But he recognized that the camera could dig out more enigmatic readings of the world. It's impossible to understate how important it was that he came to MoMA in time to promote and elucidate the work of Arbus, Friedlander and Winogrand in the New Documents Show in 1967. (Nine years later he did the same for William Eggleston.) Edward Steichen, Szarkowski's predecessor as MoMA's chief photo curator, had set the agenda for an earlier generation with The Family of Man show, the highwater mark of what you might call "photo humanism". Under Steichen's aesthetic photographs were expected to have clear meanings and well constructed compositions. He could never have promoted the weirdly ambiguous portraits of Arbus or the headlong and fractured pictures of Winogrand and Frieldlander. Arbus once wrote that "a photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know." Steichen would have put a gun to his head before he would say a thing like that. Szarkowski understood it implicitly.

He had not only an eye but a voice like few others. Szarkowski's books, especially The Photographer's Eye and Looking at Photographs, were as important his shows. He had a wonderfully serene writing style. Though he was in effect selling a new aesthetic there was nothing of the salesman or the carnival barker in his tone. And he even put his weight behind the most understated photographer of all, Eugene Atget. Szarkowski's conviction that nothing less than four major Atget shows (and books) over a period of years would do to make plain the depth of Atget's accomplishment made people re-examine Atget with an entirely new level of seriousness.

I owe alot of my own predispositions as a critic to Szarkowski. There were limits to his taste, some of which I suppose I've inherited, too. For one thing, he never cared much for the staged photographs that arrived in the '80s under the banner of Postmodernism. But as Philip Johnson was for a while in architecture, he was that thing that every curator aims to be, a force to be reckoned with in the art of his time.

July 6, 2007 11:47

On the Road Again, Again

With my visit to the Philip Johnson Glass House still fresh in my mind, thought this would be a good time to check in on that other iconic house. Back Monday to talk about it.

July 5, 2007 1:15

Sophie's Choice: The London Version

Apotheosis of King James I/Rubens, 1630 — The National Gallery, London —  Copyright: Private Collection 2000

Want to know why fundraising skills are overtaking art historical credentials as the most important job requirement for museum directors? Check out the latest issue of The Art Newspaper, which reports that the National Gallery in London faces the possibility of losing three major works — a Titian oil, a Rubens sketch and a suite of five Poussins that have been on long term loan. The reason is the one you'd expect these days. Their owners have decided to sell them.

I tend not to anguish too much over the hyperbolic art market. If some knucklehead billionaire wants to pay $13 million for a Peter Doig canoe painting, so be it. But this is another example of how the suction of a powerful market can pull pictures right off the walls of public museums — not a good thing. The prospect that the National Gallery could raise the money to buy all the works is very slim. The owner of the Titian, Lord Halifax, has already turned down an offer of $110 million from the Gallery in hope of getting more on the private market, though apparently there have been no higher offers.

Portrait of a Young Man/Titian, circa 1515-1520 — Photo: National Gallery, London

So the National Gallery is facing something like it's own version of Sophie's choice — which of its kids should it save? It appears that outgoing National Gallery Director Charles Saumarez Smith — outgoing in part to protest what he saw as insufficient government funding for his museum — has decided on the Poussins.

Extreme Unction/Poussin, circa 1637-1640

That still doesn't mean he can save them. Five oils from a series that depict the Catholic sacraments, purchase of the entire set could require the National to come up with as much as $200 million. That's a lot of fundraising, and at a bad moment. There isn't likely to be a new a director in place at the National Gallery before next year. The Art Newspaper puts it drily. "Fundraising skills will be a key requirement."

July 4, 2007 1:12

Flag of Convenience

Taking the day off. Cya tomorrow.

July 3, 2007 12:22

Too Many Stars, Not Enough Sky?

Something of a cri de couer over the weekend by Hugh Pearman in The Sunday Times of London, registering his exasperation over the global frenzy to commission buildings by the familiar roster of architecture stars. I disagree, but I lived through the '80s and '90s in New York, when much was built and almost all of it was middling and worse.

The turnaround could be said to have begun in 2000 in the work of high profile architects, with the LVMH headquarters by Christian de Portzamparc, a Pritzker winner, and with the Rose Center, a glass box planetarium by James Stewart Polshek. Then the Museum of Folk Art by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien upped the ante for intricate interiors. Richard Meier's West Side apartment towers gave Modernism back its good name. Even Yoshio Taniguchi's redesign of MoMA, a building that God knows has its shortcomings, offers, in the three sided exterior courtyard around the sculpture garden, one of the most elegant exercises in Modernist thinking I know of anywhere in the world. Finally, with Norman Foster's Hearst Tower and Frank Gehry's newly opened IAC Headquarters, you could say the bar had been definitively raised.

A whole city of starchitecture might be hard to take, but trust me we're in no danger of getting that. Builders, not architects rule, so mediocrity generally has the upper hand. (You have heard, perhaps, of the Freedom Tower they're putting up where the World Trade Center used to be?) After decades of stagnation we live in a moment of genuinely new thinking in architecture, which may be the only art — the only one — of which that would be true. Buildings by the small, glamorous phalanx of architects doing that thinking are seedbeds of inspiration for cities crammed with dull boxes. I can put up with their designer eyewear and their sometimes imperial manner if they can do anything to turn that tide.

In the Sunday Times Pearman actually looks back longingly on the days when you only got one challenging new building every decade or so. Is he serious?

July 2, 2007 2:39

Mass (MoCA) Confusion

In yesterday's Boston Globe, Ken Johnson came down pretty hard on Mass MoCA for its hard to fathom decision to show a rump version of an installation by the Swiss sculptor Christoph Buchel that the museum had commissioned, then cancelled in May after squabbling with Buchel over rising costs.

I'll let the lawyers sort out who was the injured party in the Buchel/MoCA dispute. But the museum's decision to (sort of) exhibit Buchel's installation in half finished form has always struck me as not so much a reasonable curatorial judgment call as an institutional temper tantrum, a way of sticking it to an artist who has given them a hard time. (I say "sort of" because, in addition to the work being unfinished, the museum is "showing" it behind construction fencing covered with yellow tarps.) Mass MoCA may have good reason to be exasperated by Buchel, but that doesn't excuse their decision to misrepresent his work.

My travels haven't taken me up to Mass MoCA to see the quasi-exhibit, but here's Johnson's conclusion. For some reason it doesn't surprise me:

....altogether a gloomy, frustrating, and not at all illuminating experience.