Slated to open in February 2010 is Zaha Hadid’s plan for Maxxi, the Italian national museum of 21st century art. The museum is situated in the northern outskirts of Rome, near the grounds of the 1960 Olympics and a stone’s throw away from two other architectural attractions, Renzo Piano’s music hall and Pier Luigi Nervi’s sports palace. The museum, empty of artwork until the spring, will be the main exhibition this weekend during a two-day architectural preview for the citizens of Rome, an urban center steeped in ancient history and curiously devoid of any groundbreaking contemporary architecture.
As New York Times architecture critic (and our idol) Nicolai Ouroussoff writes, Hadid’s quietly incendiary design “jolts this city back to the present like a thunderclap.” Find out why after the jump.
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Apparently having one of the most iconic museum buildings in the world and a cultural influence so strong it’s spawned its own cute phrase (the “Bilbao effect”) isn’t enough for the Spanish outpost of the Guggenheim juggernaut. The Museo Guggenheim Bilbao has just announced plans for a satellite expansion a scant 40 km from its existing Gehry-designed command center. The proposed site is located in the Basque region near Guernica, itself a cynosure for art historians after Picasso’s rendition of the 1937 bombing massacre there during the Spanish Civil War.
Which begs the question: blight on or much-needed economic catalyst to a pristine but underdeveloped coastal region? We break down the numbers after the jump. Read More »
Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, The Museum of Innocence, is now on bookshelves. Not yet available to the public is the corresponding real-world museum he is in the midst of building, which will open next year. In Pamuk’s novel, the protagonist, Kemal, collects artifacts of his beloved, and ultimately uses them to construct a shrine to her, which he calls the Museum of Innocence. The physical Museum of Innocence will be as lovingly crafted, with 83 exhibits to mirror the 83 chapters of the novel and will consist, as Kemal’s museum did, of everyday objects that had some significance to the novel’s gestation.
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Online forum ArtBabble has museums like the Guggenheim and MoMA riding the digital wave with original video contributions.
The site features exclusive content from visual heavy hitters such as the Museum of Art & Design and Art Institute of Chicago, as well as a platform for user-generated discussion. Visitors can watch lectures from the 2009 International Design Symposium, scope demos of the art-installation process, and preview Season 5 of PBS series Art:21, all providing a diverse bird’s-eye view of the world of contemporary art.
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Happy Friday! Predictably, the recession has taken a bite out of the art world, causing the cancellation of countless museum shows and exhibitions around the country and world (The Art Newspaper puts the number at 20 and counting…). The situation is “considerably worse” in North America as compared to Europe, and our friends at LACMA have been hit extremely hard. [via The Art Newspaper] Read More »
