Free-for-all at the MQ
MuseumsQuartier’s summer season officially kicks off on 8 May with the MQ Open Day. From 17:00 to 22:00, the MQ offers free admission to all of its institutions for the first time in its history. Children’s programs will begin at 15:00, and the day will also include special tours and workshops, as well as a [...]
Letters to the Editor: April 2013
To the Editor [Re: “They Eat Horses, Don’t They”, by Martin Ehl, TVR March, 2013] I don’t think British concern [about horsemeat] is just about cultural differences. A big issue is where the horsemeat actually came from. It is suspected that it was illegally smuggled into the food supply by the Romanian mafia, which means [...]
Rubik’s cube-shaped museum for Budapest
Hungarian government officials have announced plans for the construction of a national museum dedicated to the nation’s innovation, to be built in the shape of a large Rubik’s cube. The site along the Danube bank near the Rákóczi bridge, crossed by Vienna rail traffic, will highlight Hungary’s achievements, ideas, and inventions from the past 1,100 [...]
Going for the Gold
The price of gold was relatively low on 14 Mar., which may account for the crowd at the coat check as the exhibition Gold opened at the Lower Belvedere. It was indeed seductive: Rooms and walls shined, sparkled, and glimmered with (often confusing) golden works of art, coming close to sensory overload. But maybe that’s [...]
The Artist Unrevealed
“Gustav Klimt? Cash Cow!” declares a video reporter on the Leopold Museum’s home page for its exhibition Klimt persönlich (Klimt: Up Close and Personal). “Every museum is going to be milking it,” he says, in this 150th birthday year – he only hopes there’ll be something new to discover. Klimt persönlich supposedly casts “a new [...]
The Vision of John Cage
John Cage was always a hard person to categorize: A pioneer of indeterminacy, he exploited gradients of chance in the composition, performance, and interpretation of music and art. As one of the leading figures of the 20th century avant-garde, Cage was an influential composer, music theorist, writer and artist. Now, on the centennial of his [...]
The World’s Oldest Jewish Museum Looks to the Future
Light and luminous. That is the impression conveyed by Vienna’s “new” Jewish Museum, which re-opened in October after a nine month face-lift that cost a total of €2.6 million. The darkness of the Holocaust recedes from view, while gleaming Torah crowns in illumined showcases recall the wealth and vibrancy of Jewish life in the Habsburg [...]
Renaissance Man
New York, summer 2007. After eight years as director of the Austrian Cultural Forum, the government’s flagship for promoting Austrian contemporary art in America, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein had clearly won over the city’s cultural elite, not to mention his own staff. Observing him as a summer intern, it was easy to see why. Unusual for an [...]
The City of Music’s Forgotten 20th Century
When Dr Karl Albrecht-Weinberger invited me to come to the Jewish Museum Vienna (JMW) in 2002 to curate a series of biographical exhibitions on the Jewish provenance of the city’s musical heritage, the institution was riding a wave of international praise. That exhibition, “Quasi una fantasia”, went on to New York, to great acclaim, and [...]
CommentaryNovember 1, 2011No CommentRead More