Sonar is a pioneering festival that is unique in terms of its format and content: a leading international benchmark thanks to a carefully assembled range of culture that combines entertainment with artistry, the avant garde and experimentation, featuring the most consolidated artists and trends in electronic music and their interactions and hybridisations with other genres. In Barcelona, Sonar’s artistic programme is divided between the activities at Sonar by Day (concerts, showcases, professional zone, exhibition area), the keynote of which is the search for new talent, and the major shows at Sonar by Night, which presents the leading names on the international music landscape. Each year, the festival also features a series of parallel events in cultural venues in the city such as the Auditori (the Barcelona main music Auditorium) or Cosmocaixa (Barcelona’s Science Museum), and occasional collaborations with other main city events (such as the Summer festival’s GREC in 2010). Sonar Barcelona 2011 will take place on 16, 17 and 18 June.

Kleine Wundertüte

(Kleine Wundertüte is a collection of all wonderful things that we come across in our every-day life. The project is based on the idea to document, connect and share interesting information from different kinds of media.)

visit “Kleine Wundertüte’s” blog

Architect Niall McLaughlin told The Architectural Review, that his decision to ‘quote’ the Marbles on the athletes’ block came after “researching the history and significance of the screen in architecture through the writings of Gottfried Semper and Karl Bötticher.”

In the event, the decision to use the Marbles was prompted by “a clandestine conversation with senior curator Ian Jenkins late one night in the British Museum.” Why clandestine?

“The last thing I want is for people to think it is to do with representing the origins of the Olympics,” said MacLaughlin. Okay. Got it.

God forbid that the Parthenon Marbles in London might be permitted to refer in any way to their Greek origins. After all, they are now what McLaughlin himself aptly describes as “deracinated”. (Deracinated, for those without a dictionary to hand, originates from the late 16th century French term ‘déraciner’ — to tear up by the roots.)

The most interesting and ironic aspect of this news is the British Museum’s willingness to make the Marbles available for digital replication for architectural purposes.

As I pointed out in my paper on the Universal Museum, ever since Lord Elgin instructed his goons to tear up the Parthenon frieze by its roots in the early nineteenth century, a central plank of the British Museum’s propaganda has been to efface the architectural history of the Marbles:

“As late as 1928, three leading classical archaeologists, John Beazley, Donald Robertson and Bernard Ashmole, had pronounced the Parthenon Marbles as primarily works of art rather than as architectural elements – ‘Their former decorative function as architectural ornaments, and their present educational use as illustrations of mythical and historical events in ancient Greece, are by comparison accidental and trivial interests.’”
(Quoted in Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists and Aesthetes, British Museum Press, 1992, p225.)

In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s the same Ian Jenkins who approved the translation of the Marbles into MDF replicas and thereafter into pre-cast concrete panels.

Early photographs of the romantically-named ‘Athletes Village Block N15′ (Byron eat your heart out) suggests that their use in Stratford will harmonise perfectly with the British Museum’s philistine display in Bloomsbury, which jumbles the Panathenaic frieze in such a way as to make it utterly meaningless.

The Parthenon Marbles belong in Athens. Send them back.

Dr. Tom Flynn

(Dr. Tom Flynn is a London-based writer and Art historian and is frequently blogging about interesting issues in the Art business. He has published books and  written journalism at numerous magazines including The Art Newspaper, Art & Auction, ARTnews, Art Review, Art Quarterly, Apollo, The Spectator, Museums Journal, The Sculpture Journal, etc.)

Visit his blog

Currently, if you walk into the big hall of Grand Palais in Paris, you are not seeing the iron construction, instead you are caught in a huge whale. The visitor enters a walk in hose with three gigantic, spherical convexities. It is yet another sculpture of Anish Kapoor. The London based, in India born, artists was chosen as the leading artist for the fourth Monumenta in Paris. He is in line with Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra and Christian Boltanski. The red-purple of the thin membrane fogs the view of the visitor and blurs the depth. The piece is called “Leviathan” and it relates to the title “Monumenta” very well and commensurate with the architecture surrounding.

Kleine Wundertüte

(Kleine Wundertüte is a collection of all wonderful things that we come across in our every-day life. The project is based on the idea to document, connect and share interesting information from different kinds of media.)

visit “Kleine Wundertüte’s” blog

Dear Friends! I will be twittering live from this years Art Cologne and post about the greatest new (and old ) artists.

The 44th fair will be the most international ever. Modern and post-war will occupy level 1. Level 2 will present contemporary galleries, as well as Open Space and New Contemporaries, ART COLOGNE’s proven platforms for the presentation of young and cutting-edge international art.

The Vernissage will take place on April 20, 2010 from 5 p.m. until 9 p.m.

Watch the interview with the Art Cologne director Daniel Hug:

www.artcologne.de

Impressionist & Modern Art

Post-Sale Report, February 2010

For more information or to view Sotheby’s catalouge, please visit: www.sothebys.com/privateview

Victoria Febrer is exhibiting the works of her recent project “Vinografias y Vistas II” in Valencia, Spain on

Saturday, 6th February 2010 at 8 p.m. until Tuesday 23rd February 2010, 9 p.m.

All Artitions are herewith more than welcomed to join the event and see some of here great works that are made uniquely with red wine on paper.

Galería Artis
C/ Cirilo Amorós 78, 46004 Valencia SPAIN
+34 96 351 37 61

show on map

Visit Victoria’s profile on Artition

Visit Victoria’s website

Last Saturday, January 9th, “AUSGEHEN 1-3″ premiered at Schauspiel Köln. The play is a tryptich based on texts by Barbi Markovic, Ödön von Horvát and Georg Büchner, and is all about going out in times of social changes. In 3 acts, each one based in a different generation, “Ausgehen 1-3″ creates a picture of the youth, its movements and depressions.

The next performance will be on Thursday, 14.01.2010, and from there on 21.,22., and 23., February 2010 again.

Marius Bubat of COMA wrote the entire music for this play and does also act on stage. If you’re living in Cologne or plan to visit soon, this is something you shouldn’t miss! Click HERE for more details (sorry, german version only).

Photo credit: Sandra Then / Schauspiel Köln