Michelangelo, A study of a seated nude man for the ‘Battle of Cascina’. 1504-5, London: The British Museum

I’ve had the plesure of contributing an expansive, critical essay on Michelangelo’s life and art to a monumentally conceived, high-end compilation volume of the Michelangelo drawings at the British Museum, published by Spanish book afficionados Artika Press. It consists of two volumes, the central one of which includes high-quality, full-size reproductions of all the drawings, while a study book includes essays on the drawings by my excellent colleagues at the British Museum Hugo Chapman and Sarah Vowles, in addition to my essay. They are encased in a glriously wild case featuring a relief reproduction of Michelangelo’s David!

The essay was a thrill to write and I’m excited to be in such great company and to find publication under such fantastic conditions. Simply titled “Michelangelo: Life and Art”, my essay starts like this:

Michelangelo made modern art. Not alone, not

on his own, but if we were to point to a single

artist responsible for establishing in our collective

consciousness the notion of art as self-expression, it

would be he. And he did it on a scale unmatched by

his contemporaries, giving his art a heroism integral

to our narrative of his pre-eminence. Yet there are

also profound intimacies to his work, emotional

disclosures—even vulnerabilities. This dichotomy,

surely, has been crucial to his position at the centre

of the western canon.

Here’s an image of the product, which I believe retails at a price beyond most of our means.

See more on the Artika website.

The week in review

Vacation and work have kept me away for a while, a will probably continue to do so for a little while yet. While in Boston, I checked back on one of the city’s premier cultural institutions.

The new wing of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston is emblematic of museum branding today, all the more so because of the particular intractability of its foundational stipulations. In a cultural climate where having a great collection simply isn’t enough, institutional visibility has become closely tied to event culture. for a museum that can’t even rehang its collection, this is of course a problem, so what do you do? Raise $180 million and hire go-to starchitect Renzo Piano to facilitate all the things museums seem convinced they have to do to stay afloat these days: an new wing housing a concert hall, a gift shop, a restaurant, a children’s art room, an exhibition space for artists-in-residence, a greenery. All sustainable, geothermal and daylight-harvesting, of course.

You do what you gotta do to survive, I suppose, but the absurdity of this trend for museums to go extra-curricular is particularly clear at the Gardner, whose intermittently great collection is forever trapped in a mediocre hang by the vanity of its founder, who insisted that everything be presented exactly as she left it at her death. This results in many important works being hung at low visibility and in often idiosyncratic and unenlightening juxtaposition, with the preciously empty frames of masterworks stolen in 1990 remaining on the walls as if to consecrate this “vision.” A new wing could have worked wonders for the presentation of the museum’s masterpieces, if only.

Still, Boston has a new, reportedly great concert hall and I’m sure Piano’s elegant building will attract customers. It has the potential to become a strong cultural center, if it does not blow too many leaks and if the museum’s direction finds ways of breaking its somewhat stale reputation. A good thing, even if the overall tendency is troubling.

A bunch of recent comics links:

The picks of the week from around the web.

I only made the Giardini part — ie. the one with the national pavilions and the central exhibition. I lost my ticket and thus couldn’t go to the Arsenale exhibition. A loss I’ll have to cope with.

First thing I saw was a giant playground with pink bouncy castles, that didn’t look like castles but rather amorphous blobs, as well as a bunch of small wooden bridges over nothing, with lights in them. Hey kids! Architecture!

A pretty auspicious start. Most of what was on display basically came across as college poster shows with a bigger budget. Padded generously in Buzzwords: sustainability, globalisation, convergence, hybridization, performative space, utopia; Theoretical obfuscation: ontological pluralities, heterogenous systems, urban acupuncture, nodes of contact, spaces of conflict; “Clever” Puns and constructions: Welfairytales, ecoMachines, Insta-Lator, UrbanScan, doubleNegatives; and Sloganeering: ‘What Is Your Fantastic Place?’ ‘New Geography of Living’, ‘Everyville’, the ‘Continous Monument…’

Ok, so what are we talking about? This is a perfectly representative example: “This is a space created and shaped through recursive computational algorithms”, which apparently means that graphs cleverly derived from “conflicts between… traded commodities on major financial markets”, such as the use of crops for food or fuel, are used to create a three-dimensional structure. Somehow, it yields this:

Take a good look at it. It may be the future of architecture.

The environment was, naturally, a big theme for many of these installations. Apparently these represent solutions to the problems faced by architects and city planners in the 21st Century:


I believe the latter are the ecoMachines.

At least you gotta give the Danish pavilion points for cheek — positing the Roskilde Festival as a model for making dense city centres liveable:

Moving on, what do we find?

This, my friends, is the Insta-Lator. Stuff hanging from the ceiling! Made by robots! “…in [a] continuing effort to resist the limiting presuppositions and economic flimflam embedded in commercial software and existing architectural fabrication techniques…”. OK, but why can’t I shake this strange feeling of déja vu?

Which reminds me: when you’re doing an architectural show and feel that drawings and models and such are a bit outmoded, but still need to fill a big space, what’s the answer? Fill it with geometrical framework!




Vitruvius and all that, you know? Except with chairs or giant q-tips stuck on the ends.

What have we here? A project dealing with real, down-to-Earth, Joe Sixpack-type stuff that we can all understand — shipping containers:

Wait a minute. Let’s take a closer look, shall we?

Ah! That’s more like it.

And here’s ‘Upload City’. Which offers the unique experience of… crashing in limp silver beanbags, watching YouTube clips on minute laptop screens!

I don’t even know what this is:

But lest you think that everyone is on their high horse, there’s also plenty of interactive stuff going on. For real! This one even has an i-ching theme to it:

…and some glasses stacked between black cardboard boxes, circled with rocks. All part of the ‘Atlas’:

This one has… wait for it… PostIt notes! For use at your leisure:

At least this one has the right idea:

At the end of the day, I guess the Brazilian Pavilion put it best:

Anyway, what I wanted to post here are some legal walls I saw there. Most of them are from a parking area, on the warm yellow walls of these rundown and beautiful old buildings:

See more in the Bunker’s gallery. At first, I was a little offended that these buildings should suffer so, but most of the work was rather inspired, and then it struck me — many walls in the city are, in fact, painted, covered as they are in frescoes from the 16th century onwards, some of them even by Jacopo and his dynasty of painting sons.

Just as was the case in the capital of the region, Venice — though one wouldn’t know it today, because it has all peeled off in the humidity — it was very much in vogue in Bassano, and many other towns of the Veneto, to decorate buildings in this way in the 16th Century. It must have been an intoxicating experience to walk these streets back then, and in some ways, inviting graffiti writers and street artists to decorate an communal area such as this parking lot is a decision very much in keeping with the town’s tradition for public imagery.

“… if you look at any walls soiled with a variety of stains, or stones with variegated patterns, when you have to invent some location, you will therein be able to see a resemblance to various landscapes graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, great valleys and hills in any combinations. Or again you will be able to see various battles and figures darting about, strange-looking faces and costumes, and an endless number of things which you can distill into finely-rendered forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose peal you will find any name or word you care to imagine.”

Somehow auspiciously appropriate in that particular building.