Tag: 07.20.04

“Jasper Johns might have initially looked like a pop artist, but there was always something deeper going on. And if, over the past half-century, Johns has deepened what was already a pretty complex painting game, he has also mystified us. If, at the end, he is painting anything, it is the process of the mind at work, filled with stray thoughts, its affinities and enthusiasms. A mind led by curiosity, and haunted by its own past, from which it cannot extricate itself.”

Philip Dodd is resigning after seven years as director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Art. “What I have done is accept that the walls between art and science, culture and economics, art and politics have collapsed. I have tried to work in the rubble of those walls and accept that the distinctions between those things don’t exist any more.”

Liverpool has abandoned plans to build the Cloud, a 10-storey globe that “would have been the ‘Fourth Grace’ on the city’s Pier Head, joining three others landmarks, including the Liver building, known as the Three Graces. But yesterday the public sector partners involved in the scheme said it was “no longer viable” due to rising costs, design changes and potential planning problems. The structure, designed by Will Alsop, whose work includes the Peckham library in London, caused controversy in December 2002 when promoters announced it had won an architectural competition.”