Model for Guggenheim branch in Abu Dhabi, designed by Frank Gehry

The Guggenheim Foundation has embarked on its most ambitious outpost yet: a 300,000 sq ft modern art museum designed by Frank Gehry on an island off the coast of Abu Dhabi. Construction has not started, but the Persian Gulf nation has a “systemic” worker abuse problem at other construction sites in the booming region, Human Rights Watch spokeswoman Sarah Leah Whitson said Tuesday.

According to the human rights organization, the Guggenheim museum officials have not addressed concerns about how workers would be treated during the construction. “We know how construction workers are used and abused in the U.A.E.,” the spokeswoman said. “We know with confidence that workers are going to be subjected to these conditions unless the museum does something to insist otherwise.” “The museum has the chance now, but they will be powerless to stop it once the contracts are signed,” she said.

Read article (International Herald Tribune/AP, November 13, 2007)
Read article (Human Rights Watch, July 19 2007)
Read article ‘Guggenheim to build museum in Abu Dhabi’ (Guardian, July 10, 2006)

Three weeks ago, the British Museum quietly launched its comprehensive website of what it calls flat art: mostly so far its enormous collection of prints and drawings. The drawings, 50,000 of them, have all been catalogued; the prints, by no means. It is hard to say how many of them there are. There is a collection of a third of a million bookplates (yet to be tackled, and perhaps a low priority). There are large untapped resources - for instance, French satirical prints - which have not been published elsewhere in any form, and will now become searchable.

The effort goes back a long way. In 1990 a team of four staff began cataloguing the drawings. It took them 10 years. At present there are on any given day eight people at work on the online catalogue, plus volunteers. What they are feeding into the system is not just the subject, author, dimensions and technical details, but also, where relevant, the scholarly literature on a given drawing, its full provenance, who gave it to the museum and when. From any entry you can then find out, for instance, what is known about the donor of the object (many of the gifts go back to the 18th century).

Read full article (Guardian, November 10, 2007)
British Museum

Charles Saatchi has agreed to create a “Saatchi Room” in the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, reports the Art Newspaper. The London collector is to provide a changing selection of contemporary art for a room in the General Staff Building, former government offices in Palace Square that are being restored to provide a home for the Hermitage’s collection of nineteenth- to twenty-first-century art.

The move follows the opening on October 24 of Saatchi’s exhibition “USA Today,” which marks the launch of the Hermitage 20/21 project, an ambitious attempt to extend the museum’s display of post-1917 art. The scheme’s advisor is Sir Norman Rosenthal, exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy. The Hermitage has also confirmed reports that Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull could be loaned to the museum next spring, although arrangements have not been finalized.

Taken from Artforum.com (November 9, 2007)

The Elvis Is Alive Museum is a cramped 400-square-foot shrine to all things Elvis in Wright City, Mo. (Photo: Dilip Vishwanat for The New York Times)

The 16-foot-tall likeness of Elvis Presley that stands sentry here at the Elvis Is Alive Museum, a fading outpost of Americana, has seen better days. For 17 years, Bill Beeny — museum curator, real estate salesman, Baptist minister — has used the wooden cutout to lure travelers to his museum, a cramped 400-square-foot shrine to all things Elvis, but especially to its owner’s theory that the King never actually left the building.

Now, Mr. Beeny, 81, wants to convert the museum into a food bank and is auctioning its contents on eBay. His collection includes photographs, books and FBI files. The auction ended Thursday evening. Someone from the King’s home state, Mississippi, has placed the highest bid at $8,200. The auction’s terms stipulate that the high bidder must take possession of the museum’s contents by Nov. 30 — pickup only, no shipping.

Read article (The New York Times, November 8, 2007)

Dutch architect Erick van Egeraat has won an international competition for the new entrance and extension of the Drents Museum in Assen, the Netherlands. The new wing of the museum comprises approximately 2.000 m2 and will be completed in 2011. The most important aspect of Erick van Egeraat’s design is the consistent integration of the museum into the fabric of the city. A balanced play of building, landscape and water, creates a new identity for the extended museum. The staggered, organic roof of the new wing connects existing gardens and parks in the city. Erick van Egeraat is thus creating a publicly accessible park. Openings in the roof allow light to penetrate into the exhibition spaces below. The new wing links the new entrance with existing parts of the museum and the city landscape.

Subterranean museum extension with rooftop-park

An existing coach-house will serve as the museum’s new main entrance. Lifted 1 meter above the ground, the existing structure rests on a glass plinth, revealing the building’s new function in an elegant manner. The historic façade is left untouched, therefore preserving the buildings civic appearance. During the day, the glass plinth allows light to enter the building. At night, interior lighting transforms the coach-house into a beacon for the city and its inhabitants. The design reinforces both the scenic character and the cultural-historic face of Assen’s city centre.

Go to website Drents Museum
Go to website Erik van Egeraat and associates

New museum entrance in elevated coach-house

Il Treno dell’Arte (exterior)

A special train with six cars of fine art is traveling through Italy, making daily stops where people can view the 130 works of art for free. From Titian to Street Art: 500 years of Italian Art, travels on a train (Il Treno dell’Arte) that’s a mobile art gallery open to the public from 9am to 8pm. The train set off from Rome’s Termini Station on 1 October and will visit 22 cities during its 40-day voyage, pulling in at stations for a day or two so that people can jump aboard and appreciate the works on show.

Explaining the philosophy behind the initiative, curator-in-chief Antonio Maria Pivetta said that since only 10% of Italians habitually visit galleries, museums and exhibitions, “art must go to meet the people”. “The itinerant museum will visit many of the cities that are often geographically penalized from taking part in major cultural events and will take art directly to the heart of the regions,” Pivetta said.

The train is made up of six carriages, each focusing on a separate period and curated by a different expert. However, contrary to what most media suggest, one should not expect to see real masterpieces by Titian, Caravaggio and Tintoretto. For security and preservation reasons the originals are presented on large tv screens as digital images, while the original paitings are safely kept away from the risks of travelling. Nevertheless, 61,000 people climbed on to take a look, making the art train the fourth most popular museum in Italy in October.

Read article (italy, October 11th, 2007)
Go to website Il Treno dell’Arte (in Italian only)

Il Treno dell’Arte (interior)

L.A.S.E.R. Tagging by Theodore Watson at NEMO Science Center in Amsterdam

On Saturday November 3 the Amsterdam Museum Night (’n8′) took place for the 8th time. 42 Museums opened their doors between 7 pm and 2 am for an incredible amount of 26.000 visitors, most of whom were under 35. Each year the organisation of the n8 invites an artist to create a work of art to be displayed in the public space of Amsterdam. This year it had invited Theo Watson of the Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), a ‘guerilla’ unit “dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication.” The GRL is affiliated with Eyebeam, an art and technology center from New York.

The GRL employs a self-developed system called L.A.S.E.R. Tag, which is a technology that allows people to tag walls without damaging them. You simply erase the graffiti by clearing the projection. In Amsterdam Theo Watson used the outside wall of Science Center NEMO (a Renzo Piano building) as his surface. Hundreds of people have had the opportunity to write on the museum’s wall which made this interactive installation a great success. Furthermore, it was visible from a huge distance, so innocent passers-by were confronted with coded messages, shameless branding and ingenious drawings from hundreds of meters away.

L.A.S.E.R. Tag
Theodore Watson
Eyebeam
Amsterdam Museum Night

Protests by Jewish groups ended plans for a rock concert scheduled for last Saturday at the site of a Nazi death camp in Belgrade, Serbia, The Associated Press reported. On Friday, Efraim Zuroff, director of the Nazi-hunting Simon Wiesenthal Center in Jerusalem, issued a statement calling the planned performance “a heartless insult to the memory of the victims of the Nazis.” The organizers of the concert by the British band Kosheen attributed the cancellation to “pressure from foreign and domestic media.” The concert was to have been held at Staro Sajmiste, where 48,000 Jews, Serb leftists and Gypsies perished in the 1940s. The Long Play company, which organized the concert, said, “We hope that the big publicity created around the Staro Sajmiste site will be used for solving the problem of renovating the place.” Members of the dwindling Jewish population in Serbia say the camp needs to be saved from decades of neglect.

From the New York Times (November 5, 2007)

And yet another example of the ungoing efforts to capture the horrors of Nazi-Germany in a museum context. Last week the German government started construction of an exhibition center in Berlin at the site where the Gestapo, leaders of the SS and other top officials in Adolf Hitler’s police state presided over Nazi-era crimes in the period from 1933 to 1945.

The so-called Topography of Terror (German: Topographie des Terrors) started as an outdoor museum in 1987 and in 1993, an architectural competition for a museum building was won by the design of Swiss architect Peter Zumthor. However, the project was cancelled due to technical and financial reasons. In 2006 the Berlin office Heinle, Wischer und Partner won a new competition for the documentation and visitors’ center. It should be opened on May 8, 2010, the 65th anniversary of Nazi Germany’s final surrender.

 
A hand points at a detail of a scale model of a new building for the ‘Topography of Terror’ exhibition. (AP Photo/Miguel Villagran)

  
The single-story, glass-fronted pavilion, designed by German architect Ursula Wilms, should be ready in 2010. (Heinle, Wischer und Partner)

Read article (Yahoo/AP, November 2, 2007)
Go to website Topography of Terror

Quote by Peter C. Marzio in The Art Newspaper

Read article (The Art Newspaper, October 1, 2007)