"The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Taipei assured the public Tuesday that all of its exhibitions follow law and safety regulations in the wake of a controversial art show that was staged April 3. The show involved a local ..." [Read Full Article]
Published By: Focus Taiwan News Channel
On: 05/04/11
Website: http://focustaiwan.tw/
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Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Showing posts with label museums. Show all posts
Jerry Saltz's Top Ten NY 2010 Art Shows
The Year in Art
By Jerry Saltz
1. “Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936”
At the Guggenheim Museum through January 9, 2011
It’s not often that a show pulls back the curtain on conventional wisdom or revises art history outright. But guest curator Kenneth Silver has done that with panache. Thanks to his show, we have a clearer, less formalist idea of what was going on across Europe between the wars. As we’ve long suspected, art didn’t simply march forward from Cubism in the teens through Dada and Surrealism in the twenties and thirties; it made some strange pit stops along the way, into an often disturbing realism. At the grand, terrifying end to this show—just yards from Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s ode to Teutonic superiority—is the work of one of Hitler’s favorite painters, Adolf Ziegler. That his triptych of four sinewy female nudes looks uncannily like the work of John Currin left me gasping about the present.
2. Tino Sehgal’s ‘This Progress’
Guggenheim Museum
You began the walk up the Guggenheim’s ramp—the walls stripped of art—accompanied by a child actor. At different stages, you were handed off to an older actor. As you progressed to the top, the talk was of progress; with each guide, the conversation would deepen or die, become more or less personal. What I loved? That Sehgal’s creation—as real as the Mona Lisa—offered such an expansive and moving (emotionally and physically) definition of art.
3. Heat Waves in a Swamp: The Paintings of Charles Burchfield”
Whitney Museum of American Art; curated by Robert Gober
It was a tremendous treat to rediscover the near-forgotten American visionary Burchfield, who turned ordinary things into eerie (ectoplasmic hills!), utterly original, even magical art. I much prefer the haunting, unknowable Burchfield to the Whitney’s main man of constant solitude, Edward Hopper.
4. Sarah Sze
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Sze went all out in this two-story-high gallery show, inhabiting the area with a madly replicating architecture of multiple parts (fans, lights, pieces of bicycles). Space was explored, expanded, slowed down, woven back together, and transformed into the abstract machine it may be.
5. Jessica Jackson Hutchins
Derek Eller Gallery and Laurel Gitlen
Hutchins is leading art into some fantastically promising places. With these two shows—“Kitchen Table Allegory” and “Over Come Over”—she turned abstraction and sculpture into imaginary fictions that are at once archaic, architectonic, filled with longing, and enchantingly awkward.
6. Joanna Malinowska, “Time of Guerrilla Metaphysics”
Canada
Her show opened at the end of 2009, but the physical presence, imaginative audacity, and sheer psychic power of Malinowska’s massive Boli figure—placed at the center of her excellent show—haunted me all year. The traditional tribal sculpture is made partially of excrement; the artist fabricated hers with wood, plaster, clay, and scraps of Spinoza’s Ethics.
7. Huma Bhabha, “Sculptures”
Salon 94 Bowery, through December 19
Bhabha’s formally inventive and rough sculptures of faces, bodies, fetishistic figures, and war machines conjure Roman antiquity and urban renewal, proving that serious high-mindedness doesn’t have to be freighted with bombast or bathos.
8. Mike and Doug Starn, “Big Bambú”
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The brothers took the roof of the Met and spun it into a gigantic, evolving nest crawling with viewers. Thrillingly participatory and experientially awesome, it never stopped growing—much like the museum itself.
9. Arlene Shechet, “The Sound of It”
Jack Shainman Gallery
It’s exciting to see artists using materials that, until recently, were ridiculed by the art world for being decorative or crafty. And somehow Shechet turned a variety of gnarly, curling, enigmatic (and oddly sexy!) objects into a convincing language of sculptural form.
10. “#class”
Winkleman Gallery
Just when we needed it, the spirit of activism, anarchy, and making it up as you go surfaced in this exhibition—a kind of think tank meets tribal gathering. Organized by artists Jennifer Dalton and William Powhida, “#class” was open to anyone who wanted to see performances, or talk about the market, careerism, and bad critics. Consciousness and hackles were raised; energy was generated.
This article is from: http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2010/69899/
Italian Museums Closed By Strike Protesting Deep Cuts In Culture Funding
Italian cultural attractions go on strike over cuts
Rome's Maxxi art museum is on strike
Image Via BBC News
Most of Italy's major cultural attractions are closed because of a one-day strike over government plans to cut their funding.
Hundreds of museums, art galleries and heritage sites are affected.
The Italian government wants to cut 280 million euros (£237m, $380m) from the culture budget over the next three years as part of an austerity drive.
Italy has more World Heritage Sites than any other country, a fact that has put even greater strain on funding.
The collapse of a house at Pompeii last weekend raised new questions over the country's ability to maintain its heritage.
Culture Minister Sandro Bondi came under pressure to resign after the "House of the Gladiators" fell down at the 2,000-year-old site.
Critics blamed a lack of money for maintenance and say it is an example of why Italy's culture investment should rise, not fall, the BBC's Duncan Kennedy reports.
The government says it is trying to attract private investment to safeguard the country's rich cultural portfolio and help ease the strain on the over-extended public purse. But it argues that it cannot avoid making painful economies.
Closed or restricted
Tourists will have a hard time finding a cultural institution that is open in Italy on Friday, our correspondent says.
Around 800 museums, art galleries, libraries and heritage sites will be affected by the strike.
Those that are not fully closed will have restricted hours.
The strikes will affect 11 museums in Venice and others in Turin, Florence and also Rome, where its newly opened Maxxi museum of modern art will be among the sites shut.
Italian heritage experts warn that many other monuments, including Bologna's twin towers, Florence's Cathedral and Nero's Golden House in Rome, are vulnerable to collapse.
"With no maintenance and non-existent funds, the whole of Italy is at risk of collapsing," Alessandra Mottola Molfino, head of the heritage charity Our Italy, told the AFP news agency earlier this week.
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