Monthly Archive for June, 2011

By Steve Delahoyde from mediabistro.com

Though technically a public museum and therefore always free to enter, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art doesn’t tend to highlight that fact at its ticketing counter, other than in some fine print that reads “suggested donation.” Come July 1st, those listed ticket fees are going to be boosted by a few dollars, with the museum claiming “economic necessity” has required them to raise those rates a touch to cover expenses. The current fees are $20 for adults, $15 for seniors, and $10 for students. At the start of next month, they’ll move up to $25, $17, and $12, respectively. Granted, you still don’t have to pay a dime, which this writer has attempted, just to see if it worked. Of course it did and no one from the Met’s staff seem to care in the slightest, but like in that experiment, it might riddle you with paranoia and guilt during your entire visit, so it might just be better to fork out the supportive cash, unless you’re of a braver constitution than we.

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Image Courtesy of Ym Yik/European Pressphoto Agency

By Joyce Hor-Chung Lau from The New York Times

Hong Kong- This is a fast city, where skyscrapers go up in a blink and neighborhoods are transformed overnight.

It is also a rich city. The budget set aside for new cultural development would be the envy of any arts administrator: 21.6 billion Hong Kong dollars, or about $2.8 billion, to build 15 performance venues, a museum, an exhibition center and a giant park on some of the world’s most valuable undeveloped waterfront property.

And yet the 40-hectare, or almost 100-acre, site reclaimed from the South China Sea in the 1990s for this purpose is still empty, except for a walkway and an orange sign advertising a “West Kowloon Cultural District” that does not exist.

The years have seen international attention come and go. The heads of the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York once visited with charm offensives, hoping to build branches here, but interest petered out. Endless plans were rejected, like one by the architect Norman Foster to build the world’s largest canopy.

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Image courtesy of Marc Aert

By Roman Hollenstein from signandsight.com

MAS in Antwerp: a new museum by Neuteling & Riedijk takes city history to a whole new level.

Antwerp is an unappreciated beauty with a dubious reputation. But the city, which has fallen into disrepute as a bastion of Flemish nationalism, surprises its visitors with its cultural cosmopolitanism.  A top source of pride is the fashion scene, which showcases its creations in the hip neighbourhood surrounding Dries van Noten’s fashion temple and the Fashion Museum opened in 2002, which the Ghent architect Marie-José Van Hee furnished with a theatrically stepped foyer serving both as an ideal place to pose and a catwalk. As the city on the Schelde became a fashion mecca towards the end of the 1980s, thanks to the meteoric rise of the “Antwerp Six”, a small architectural miracle emerged. On the rundown waterfront along the Schelde, Bob van Reeth, the father of new Flemish architecture, built the eye-catching, striped Huis Van Roosmalen and also – as part of the restoration of the burned down riverbank terraces – the Zuiderterras Café that resembles the form of a ship, while Willem-Jan Neutelings erected an apartment building whose wooden facade was intended to recall Antwerp’s maritime tradition.

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