Newest Entries
Tour Groups Take Documenta to Court; Documenta Reports High Attendance; New Museum Outside Athens; Tel Aviv as EU Cultural Capital?
DOCUMENTA 12 TOUR MONOPOLY GOES TO THE COURTS
Who has the right to give guided tours of Documenta 12? As Die Welt's Peter Dittmar reports, this question lies at the heart of a bizarre legal conflict between Documenta 12 and the commercial travel group Studiosus, which has organized trips to the event.
According to D12 house rules, "moderated talks and guided tours from commercial providers are not approved." Only the official "art mediators"—trained by Documenta 12 staff—are allowed to give tours of the exhibition. Studiosus is now challenging D12's monopoly in German courts, having filed an official complaint backed by the German Travel Association.
The rule is not a new one. At Okwui Enwezor's Documenta 11, in 2002, tours given by outsiders were not allowed. Only the officially trained guides—120 in full—were considered "competent" enough to talk about the art. When enough experts came to the fore, the rule was rearticulated as a safeguard against "busloads" of tourists, whose loud-speaking guides might disturb other visitors.
As Dittmar notes, the recalcitrance against large tourist groups doesn't fit with an event that seeks high visitor numbers. The latest argument is that commercial guides like Studiosus will undermine D12's educational mission. "That sounds like an attempt—from a highly subsidized yet commercial enterprise like Documenta—to exclude unwanted competition," writes Dittmar, adding that private tours are not prohibited by any major German museum.
"The only thing we want," said Roger M. Buergel in a statement, "is that commercial tour guides register with us beforehand." In principle, no one is prohibited from giving tours. For Studiosus, Buergel's affirmation is "simply false." Now it's up to local courts to decide whether Documenta has infringed on the right to professional free practice, as well as on German antitrust laws.
DOCUMENTA 12 REPORTS HIGH ATTENDANCE
The Süddeutsche Zeitung's Holger Liebs reports that despite the ban on "unauthorized" guided tours and a round of stinging reviews, Documenta 12 has managed to pull in a record numbers of visitors. Halfway through its hundred-day run—which Guardian critic Adrian Searle dubbed "100 days of ineptitude"—the event has attracted 330,000 visitors, a figure that could reach a record-breaking 700,000 by the time the event closes in September. (Documenta 11 attracted a total of 650,000 visitors.)
Liebs attributes the success to Buergel alone and wonders how he has managed to attract such crowds to an event in which one venue, the Aue-Pavilion, was labeled "a catastrophe" by the New York Times's Holland Cotter. Buergel's call for a new art public seems to have fallen on sympathetic ears, although the curator always rejected the hype surrounding the contemporary art market and must-see shows.
"For Buergel, it was about something else," writes Liebs, "art's new commitment, its duty to a democratic ideal"—a collective duty that might be debated, if not fulfilled, in the public discussion areas known as "Circles of Enlightenment." "That's how he wanted to maintain a semblance of individuality in this mass event," writes Liebs. "The astonishing thing is that he managed to pull it off."
Liebs ponders Buergel's "autoimmune strategy." Early on, the curator announced that Documenta 12's failure could well be a desirable outcome as a sign of art's capacity to polarize. The collapse of Ai Wei Wei's sculpture Template in a windstorm was called a "productive failure." While this "pretentious" position goes against the ideal of a new art public, it also raises another problem: What is to be done with success?
NEW MODERN ART MUSEUM NEAR ATHENS
A new museum to house modern artworks from the Goulandris Foundation will be built southeast of Athens. As Agence France-Presse reports, Georges Souflias, the Greek minister of the environment, made the announcement after the foundation accepted his proposal to use a new green space near the city's former airport as a site for the building. I. M. Pei will design the museum for the fifteen-hundred-acre park.
The Foundation Goulandris—named after collectors Basil and Elise Goulandris—had previously planned a museum designed by Pei in Athens in 1992. By January 1997, that project was abandoned, due to the discovery of the remains of Aristotle's school at the building site. Currently housed in a small institute on Andros Island, the foundation's collection includes works by Picasso, Matisse, de Chirico, Balthus, Kandinsky, Giacometti, Klee, Kupka, Braque, Masson, and Miró.
TEL AVIV AS EUROPEAN CULTURAL CAPITAL?
Could Tel Aviv be a European Cultural Capital? As the Süddeutsche Zeitung reports, that's the dream of Tel Aviv's mayor, Ron Huldai, who sees the title as the perfect cap to the city's centenary celebrations in 2009. It appears as though preparations are already under way, with a whirlwind of renovations and constructions in the city center. A wave of EU funding would certainly help. Huldai is undeterred by the fact that Israel is not a member of the EU, nor does he seem worried by the stipulation that nominations for Cultural Capitals must be made ten years before the title is awarded. Indeed, Huldai says that he has already garnered "much sympathy" for his proposal from EU politicians.