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The Austrian newspaper Der Standard reports on the idea of Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi to convert the golden dome that crowns the Vienna’s Secession into a five-star hotel room. The museum has already started constructing this temporary guestroom, and expects to welcome its first guest later this summer. The project “HIER ENTSTEHT EIN HOTEL” is part of the Secession’s summer outdoor program, which also includes an ‘Art mosque’ (Kunstmoschee by Azra AkÅ¡amija) and a sausage stand (Die Wursthaberer by Patrick Baumüller and Severin Hofmann). The combination of meat and Islam will definitely help visitors who have booked the hotel room to get a good night’s sleep.

Read article in Der Standard (In German, July 19, 2007))
Go to website Secession

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A forgotten monument to Hitler’s ideology has emerged from a 70-year time warp — a castle built in the 1930s to train a new Nazi elite. Vacated by the Belgian army last year, it sheds light on the systematic brainwashing that churned out a generation of fanatics. Now it’s being spruced up to teach visitors about the perils of indoctrination.

Deep in the Eifel region of western Germany, a stone-clad reminder of Hitler’s racist ideology towers above the surrounding wooded hills — the remains of a training college for aspiring Nazi leaders that was built in the style of a medieval castle.

“NS-Ordensburg Vogelsang” (Vogelsang National Socialist Castle) is a dour arrangement of barracks, community halls and sports arenas hugging a steep slope down to a scenic reservoir. It was built between 1934 and 1936 to give selected Nazi party members aged between 25 and 30 a solid grounding in the superiority of the German race and its need for “Lebensraum” in the east.

Read full article (Spiegel Online, July 24, 2007)
Pictures of Vogelsang

Wired Magazine of August brings a story about the ambition of the California Academy of Sciences to be the greenest museum on earth:

Nestled into the fog and forest of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, the California Academy of Sciences aims to be the world’s largest eco-friendly public building when it reopens in 2008. (It’s bucking for a platinum LEED green-building certification.) Architect Renzo Piano used a textbook’s worth of enviro-engineering tricks for the seven-year effort, an almost total teardown and rebuild. At $484 million, it’s one of the most expensive museum projects in a century. But if it all works as planned, the city will boast a natural history museum that enhances nature instead of just stockpiling it.

Read further on Wired.com
Building The New Academy

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The Dutch hip hop artist and underground phenomenon DuvelDuvel is about to release his latest album Puur Kultuur at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, says his label TopNotch Records in a press release. The acclaimed DuvelDuvel is a true product of the city of Rotterdam, with his uncompromising lyrics and straightforward diction.

The NAi however does not announce this event on its Web site. It seems that where other museums are looking for more popular means of attracting younger crowds by inviting youth culture onto its premises, the NAi hosts one of the Netherland’s most respected figures of urban culture without making this public.

DuvelDuvel homepage
NAi homepage

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A woman who says she was so overcome with passion for a valuable painting on display in France, has been charged with criminal damage after kissing it. The 3×2m (9×6-foot) painting by US artist Cy Twombly is valued at more than $2m (£970,000).

Staff at the Collection Lambert museum in the southern French city of Avignon alerted police after the incident on Thursday afternoon and she was arrested as she was walking out. Ms Rindy, herself an artist, is due to appear in court on 16 August.

Read full article (BBC News, 21 July 2007)

Finally Tate has bundled its vast archive of talks, performances and videos into a neatly constructed video application. The BT Tate Player is yet another example of a site specific YouTube alternative - other good ones are TED and Fabchannel.Tate was one of the first museums in the world to record and archive its events online, but never had a good infrastructure to display this rich collection. The Tate Player encompasses audio and video of Tate’s events, and adds new Tate Shots and existing audiovisual works from the Tate Modern collection, such as videos by Gilbert & George, and interviews with Frank Stella and Sol LeWitt.

Will Gompertz, director of Tate Media, said: “It’s an exciting project with limitless potential and we’re delighted to be able to share with a broader audience the original audiovisual content of the Tate Archive.”

The new design and interface is a major improvement, however the search function remains complex. Search results are expected to be related to the Tate Player, but instead give links to the whole Tate Online site. Hopefully Tate will see this flaw in the logic of the service and it will correct this. Other than that, it is yet a step forward to opening up the museum.

Tate Player

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A live Madagascar hissing cockroach; a giant blue nose that sneezes spray at visitors; an I-beam on which visitors precariously perch; chronicles of epidemics; creatures that sting and bite; Imax footage of Hurricane Katrina hitting the bayou: These are the signs of an aggressive and sometimes distressing world that emerge at the ambitious $109 million transformation of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City.

The center, which reopened yesterday after two years of construction, has been rethought and reshaped, with the goal of doing nothing less than reinventing the science museum.

Read full article (New York Times, July 20, 2007)

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62 years after its liberation by the Allied Forces The Bavarian concentration camp Flossenbürg opens as a museum:

An estimated 30,000 prisoners lost their lives at Flossenbuerg in the southern German state of Bavaria. Many of them were from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, including Jews from Hungary and Poland, as well as political prisoners from Germany.

From its founding in 1938 to its liberation on April 23, 1945, by American troops, more than 100,000 people were detained at the camp and its more than 90 external branches.

“I bow my head in front of you,” Bavarian Governor Edmund Stoiber said in a speech to the 84 former prisoners who participated in the ceremony. ”We will do everything to make sure that you will never be forgotten.”

Read full article (ynetnews.com, July 22, 2007)
Flossenbürg on Wikipedia

The new head of the Science Museum has an uncompromising view about how global warming should be dealt with: get rid of a few billion people. Chris Rapley, who takes up his post on September 1, is not afraid of offending. ‘I am not advocating genocide,’ said Rapley. ‘What I am saying is that if we invest in ways to reduce the birthrate - by improving contraception, education and healthcare - we will stop the world’s population reaching its current estimated limit of between eight and 10 billion.

‘That in turn will mean less carbon dioxide is being pumped into the atmosphere because there will be fewer people to drive cars and use electricity. The crucial point is that to achieve this goal you would only have to spend a fraction of the money that will be needed to bring about technological fixes, new nuclear power plants or renewable energy plants. However, everyone has decided, quietly, to ignore the issue.’

Such arguments give an indication of the priorities of the new Science Museum chief, an office that has been vacant since 2005 when Lindsay Sharp abruptly left the £150,000 post following rows about financial waste, cronyism and the ‘Disneyfication’ of exhibitions.

Read full article (Observer, July 22, 2007)

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Todd Heisler/The New York Times

‘The Shapes of Space,” the Guggenheim Museum’s spirited if sometimes disjointed display of works from its collection, might almost be titled “Welcome to the 21st Century.”

Its accomplishments are several:

It puts on view many of the museum’s latest acquisitions. While a 1913 Mondrian is the show’s earliest work, nearly half were acquired after 2000.

It allows two young assistant curators and one curatorial assistant - Ted Mann, Nat Trotman and Kevin Lotery - to spread their wings, under the supervision of Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator.

It shows the Guggenheim, under Lisa Dennison, its director, trying to look like a museum and make active use of its collection, rather than functioning mostly as a kunsthalle dedicated to traveling blockbusters.

Read full article (International Herald Tribune, 20 July 2007)