The National Library of Ireland is offering a virtual tour of the exhibition “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” on the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.
The notebook of one of Ireland’s most famous poets is one of thousands of objects in an exhibition titled “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” at the National Library of Ireland. Next to its display case the entire notebook has been digitally reincarnated. With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry.
The exhibition is more like a life-size, walk-through Web site than an ordinary museum show. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries. You can also take a virtual tour of the exhibition by visiting the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.
At its core the exhibition offers Yeats’s papers not as relics but as living documents. The visitor sees a manuscript of “Sailing to Byzantium”. Next to the display a digital tutorial shows how he kneaded the words and notions of the poem. Only in later drafts did he find a streak of lightning to open the poem: “That is no country for old men.” Elsewhere software developed by the British Library allows visitors to page through digitized manuscripts.
The exhibition has been described in The Irish Timesas “one of the most important literary exhibitions yet staged internationally”. It opened in 2006 and will run until January, then move to the United States if the library can find a suitable host.
Read more (International Herald Tribune, July 21, 2008)
Kiasma’s miniramp opened to the public in june as part of URB 08
Kiasma is the sympathetic museum of modern art of Helsinki, built 10 years ago by architect Steven Holl. It has a remarkable position on one of the two main axes of Helsinki, near central station,Stockmann department store and mbar, hang out for skaters, hackers and (non-)hipsters. With 200.000 visitors annually, Kiasma is the most popular museum of Finland. With numerous skaters, goths, young tourists and drunk teenagers crowding the adjacent grass, it is also one of the coolest museums of Europe.
Kiasma celebrates urban culture by hosting the URB festival. Already in its ninth year, national and international makers of urban culture and art are presented in and outside of the museum, as installation, performance, website, workshop etc. This year URB will take place concurrently with Kiasma’s tenth-year anniversary exhibition, The Fluid Street.
One of the installations is the miniramp that opened to the public in June, with activities including skating, competitions, and skate lessons. The closing of the skating season, in turn, will be celebrated in typical Finnish style: sauna, ‘olut’ and skating on September 21st. The ramp has been created in cooperation with the Finnish Skateboarding Federation, and the ramp itself has been designed by Antti Yli-Tepsa. For those who cannot visit Helsinki this summer: the ramp will be back next summer.
‘Restoration Rocks’: jewelry collection with fragments of Guggenheim Museum’s iconic Frank Lloyd Wright building encapsulated in glass.
Always dreamed of owning an architectural masterpiece? Since last April the Guggenheim Museum in New York is offering Restoration Rocks, a special edition jewelry line that incorporates actual historic fragments of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Guggenheim Museum. The jewelry line is sold exclusively at the Guggenheim Museum’s retail store and on its website, in anticipation of the museum’s 50th anniversary in 2009.
Designed and fabricated by California-based jewelry artist, Cara Tilker, the collection features nine different designs including earrings, pendants, bracelets, a ring, and cuff links. Lightweight concrete and Gunite remnants, set aside during the 2007 restoration process from the building’s walls, are presented in resin and sterling silver settings. The Restoration Rocks jewelry will be limited in quantity with retail prices ranging from $125.00 to $4,350.00.
As the original landmark building of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, approaches its fiftieth anniversary in 2009, aspects of its facade and rotunda structure are carefully restored. (Photo: David Heald)
Visit the Guggenheim Podcasts page to download an audio file about the exterior restoration. Learn more about the exterior restoration and on the Exterior Restoration page. The Building page provides a brief history of the Frank Lloyd Wright-building. Shop online for merchandise inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s landmark building.
I.M. Pei’s glass pyramid serves as the museum’s entrance since 1989.
TIME Magazine writes about the revival of the world’s most renowned museum under the reign of Henri Loyrette, its ambitious director. Armed with a vision of the Louvre as a beacon of culture that is both accessible and global, he has set in motion a dramatic opening up to the outside world. So far, that includes signing a controversial deal to create a Louvre museum in Abu Dhabi, and staging exhibitions of the museum’s treasures in places like Atlanta, Oklahoma City, Kobe, Valencia and Macao.
The Abu Dhabi Louvre project is underway with this design by French architect Jean Nouvel. (Courtesy Jean Nouvel)
He helped organizing a charity auction and a Duran Duran concert held under the Louvre’s landmark glass pyramid:
Most controversially, Loyrette has also invited contemporary artists to exhibit at the Louvre and even decorate it — provoking howls of protests from French detractors. An exhibition by Belgian artist Jan Fabre that was held earlier this summer in galleries containing Dutch and Flemish masterpieces a gigantic. The show included an self-portrait as an earthworm wriggling on upended gravestones and sharing a space with 21 Rubens depictions of Marie de Medicis.
Fabre’s controversial new work, Self-Portrait as the World’s Biggest Worm, is not to everyone’s taste.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi during his last election campaign.
Silvio Berlusconi has threatened to withdraw planning permission for a new contemporary art museum and commercial development in Milan designed by Daniel Libeskind after the US-based architect described the Italian Prime Minister as a “xenophobe” and called his policies “repulsive”. According to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, Berlusconi objects to this design because it is not manly enough and communicates a sense of impotence. In an interview with the same newspaper, Libeskind hit back: “In Fascist Italy, everything that was not ‘straight’ was considered ‘perverse art’.
Berlusconi is notorious for his manipulation of the press, but Libeskind’s own populist appeal is also legendary. The small, fast-talking architect always draws a crowd on the international lecture circuit and he even appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. However, it remains to be seen who will really prove to be manly enough to end this childish quarrel. Vittorio Sgarbi, a former culture adviser to the city of Milan, told the Italian periodical Il Giornale dell’Arte: “I don’t think the Prime Minister will let him proceed with his skyscraper or his museum unless he apologises.”
Libeskind’s design for a curving skyscraper (middle) in Milan is not manly enough, says Berlusconi (Photo: EPA) Read more: The Independent The Art Newspaper
Amsterdam’s Historical Museum finally realized an online catalogue, which provides a systematic index with information about over a thousand paintings dating from before 1800, including masterpieces by Rembrandt, Saenredam and Steen. Launched today, the website already looks rather out-of-date. Nonetheless, a wide range of information is provided about each painting: artist, title, date, material, measurements, inscriptions, location (on display or in storage), provenance, bibliographical references and a selection of (recent) exhibitions.
Visitors can refine their search results and can choose from a list of fixed catagories or can simply rely on the director’s choice. In terms of user generated content the website lacks the social tagging functionalities that have fundamentally democratized such progressive institutions as the Brooklyn Museum in New York or Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. But before the museum loses itself in technological trickery it can take the next small step by making the online cataloque bilingual.
Turkish novellist Orhan Pamuk (Photograph: Eamonn McCabe)
The Nobel Prize laureate Orhan Pamuk has canceled an exhibition of his “Museum of Innocence” at Frankfurt’s Kunsthalle Schirn. As the Frankfurter Rundschau’s Claus-Jürgen Göpfert reports, the exhibition was due to open on October 14, just in time for the city’s renowned international book fair, where Turkey is this year’s special guest. At the Schirn exhibition, the novel was to function as the exhibition catalogue; Pamuk will still read excerpts from the book at the fair.
The “Museum of Innocence” is a collection of everyday objects and curiosities that Pamuk has amassed over the years. Moreover, it’s also the title of the Turkish writer’s latest novel, which places the collection at the center of a love story that takes place in Istanbul in the 1970s and ’80s. According to Bloomberg, Pamuk was inspired by the Gustave Moreau Museum in Paris, based in the 19th-century painter’s home. Pamuk is building the museum in Cihangir, an upscale neighborhood in central Istanbul.
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and his Monogramouflage canvases and signature bags for French fasion brand Louis Vuitton. These limited edition items were on display last year at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, and are now the subject of a lawsuit.
A luxury boutique in the middle of an art exhibition was supposed to be controversial, but not a legal matter. The temporary retail space allowed in October by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Los Angeles has become the center of litigation, though. A law suit by an L.A. collector alleges that Louis Vuitton failed to take the law into account when selling limited-edition prints by Japanese Pop artist Takashi Murakami at his show at the museum’s Geffen Contemporary.
The 500 Murakami prints that were on sale for an average of $8,000 lacked the ironclad certification required, making them less valuable for resale. A museum spokeswoman said that officials would reserve comment while reviewing the suit. Meanwhile, Louis Vuitton said in a statement that the collector’s suit is “baseless litigation,” and that he refused the company’s offer of a refund plus interest.
The artist retrospective, Vuitton store included, is now at the Brooklyn Museum in New York till July 13.
Government officials in Bilbao, Spain, have proposed that a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum there be built in the countryside, beyond the city’s outskirts, Reuters and the New York Times reported. José Luis Bilbao, who leads the Vizcaya provincial government, said that local officials could finance the project, to be built in a nature reserve.
Juan Ignacío Vidarte, director general of the Bilbao Guggenheim, known for its twisting, titanium-clad building designed by Frank Gehry, said the new branch would link art with the notion of environmental sustainability. He did not say who would design the building or when it would open.
A set of matryoshkas, traditional Russian dolls, depicting the band members of The Rolling Stones, who played in front of the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg in 2007. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)
Ears aren’t the only items that may suffer from blaring rock music. The preliminary results of a Russian study by scientists at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg found that rock concerts by the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and others in the adjacent Winter Square have affected their collections over the past three years, The Independent of London reported.
The research, now being examined by the Grabar Art Restoration Institute in Moscow, showed that every 10 concerts above 82 decibels added an extra year to the age of a work because of vibrations. After a 2004 McCartney concert shook the windows of the Hermitage, the museum asked the Stones last year to keep the sound level below 85 decibels to protect works by the likes of Cézanne and Matisse in the palace’s nearby wings.
Rolling Stones “Start Me Up” played live in St Petersburg in 2007
The National Library of Ireland is offering a virtual tour of the exhibition “The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats” on the award-winning Yeats Exhibition homepage.
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Posted by Michiel van Iersel
