绿茶拿铁 Green Tea Latte

[Sharing] Beijing’s New Plan to Reduce the Number of Cars

zhangxiaomin — Fri, 03 October 2008 00:28:39 -0400

The Beijing Municipal Government has announced a series of post-Olympics car restrictions that will take effect next month. According to the English-language report, under the new rules, 30 percent of government vehicles will be taken off the roadand as of Oct 11, the remaining 70 percent of government vehicles, along withcorporate and private cars, will be banned from driving one day during the five-day-working week. Cars ending with either a one or a six will be banned onMondays; those ending with a two or a seven will be banned on Tuesdays, and so on.

The article goes on to clarify that:

The ban will be applicable within the Fifth Ring Road inclusive,from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for private cars and round the clock for government and corporate vehicles. It will take effect on a trial basis on October 11 for six months until April 10, but does not apply to police wagons, ambulances, fire and corporate vehicles.

Aside from this new rule forcing cars to spend one of the five working days off the road, the city government has also drafted a few other measures to discourage Beijing residents from driving:

Limiting the issue of registration plates
Only 100 thousand plates will be issued each year from now on. Considering 400 thousand new cars appear on Beijing streets every year at present, this measure will efficiently reduce the total amount of cars in the Capital.

Increasing the cost of parking
Raising the parking charges is another measure. The price of the downtown parking lots might be 5 or 6 times higher than the current standard. The government hopes the economic level principle can improve the city’s central part’s traffic.

Developing public transport system and facilities
The government is going to further strengthen the construction of the city transport system by the implementing a traffic network plan. The plan involves the construction of three more subway lines (14, 7 and 15), which will increase the total amount of and distance covered by subway lines to 270 km. The goal is to have one new line running every year and to achieve a comprehensive transportation system that is aimed at integrating the urban center with the rural area as well as speed up the parking and transferring facility construction of public transport

Links and Sources
Xinhua: Post-Olympics Beijing car restrictions to take effect next month
Beijing Times: 北京市人民政府关于实施交通管理措施的通告

Dayoo.com: 北京停车费近期不会上涨

New Chief Curator Appointed at MoMA

zhangxiaomin — Thu, 04 September 2008 12:41:57 -0400

After a six-month search, the Museum of Modern Art has chosen one of its own curators, Ann Temkin, to succeed John Elderfield, who retired as chief curator of painting and sculpture in July.

Ms. Temkin assumes the curatorial post, considered the most prestigious in the field of Modern art, as MoMA gears up for its second growth spurt in less than a decade. After an $858 million expansion completed in 2004, the museum plans to extend its galleries further in a tower that is being built next door on West 54th Street in Manhattan. The museum is also in the midst of rethinking how it presents the history of Modern art through its world-class collection.

(Source: New York Times)

In addition to the display of paintings and sculptures, Ms. Temkin’s top responsibilities will include planning special exhibitions and advising the museum on acquisitions.

“I plan to take a broader, more international view than we did in the past,” said Ms. Temkin, 48, who arrived at MoMA in 2003 after 13 years as a curator at thePhiladelphia Museum of Art.

Since the era of Alfred H. Barr Jr., MoMA’s legendary founding director, the museum has played a greater role than any other institution in carving out a canon of Modern movements under curators like William Rubin, Kirk Varnedoe and Mr. Elderfield, who is now the museum’s chief curator emeritus. Yet in recent years some art-world critics have felt that the museum should have been more on top of what was happening in contemporary art. Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities was to ensure that MoMA’s collection of contemporary art is unrivaled.

“That’s who we are,” she said.

In seeking a successor to Mr. Elderfield, said Glenn D. Lowry, the Modern’s director, the museum interviewed “a considerable number of people from many points of the world.”

“Sometimes you have to look way outside to realize what you have within,” he added. Among those who are said to have been considered are Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles; Philippe Vergne, the former deputy director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the new director of the Dia Art Foundation; and Donna De Salvo, chief curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One of Ms. Temkin’s long-term challenges will be planning the reinstallation of the collection as the museum adds roughly 50,000 square feet of gallery space. Plans call for the Modern to extend its galleries on the second, fourth and fifth floors into a 75-story tower designed by the architect Jean Nouvel that is to be completed in three or four years.

Ms. Temkin said that one of her priorities would be to “change our viewers’ experience in many ways,” especially by integrating painting and sculpture with other mediums. The Modern and many other museums still have separate departments for painting and sculpture, film and video, and prints and drawings.

Ms. Temkin called that approach outdated. She said that she planned to “reflect the way artists work today, where these divisions are far less prevalent.”

She also intends to change the works in the permanent galleries more frequently. “I’d like to mix the foundation of the collection in new ways, to animate those galleries so they are constantly full of unexpected revelations,” she said.

Unlike Mr. Elderfield, whose chief scholarly interests ranged from artists like Bonnard, Picasso and Matisse to postwar artists like Bridget Riley and Richard Diebenkorn, Ms. Temkin is more firmly grounded in postwar and contemporary art, keeping up with many notable figures working today.

She earned her doctorate in art history at Yale and worked at the Modern from 1984 to 1987 as a curatorial assistant in the painting and sculpture department. Taking the job of curator of modern and contemporary art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990, she organized exhibitions on artists including Barnett Newman, Alice Neel and Raymond Pettibon.

On Mr. Elderfield’s watch, the Modern hired Ms. Temkin in 2003 to work on a curatorial team in the painting and sculpture department. In addition to helping reinstall painting and sculpture galleries when the museum reopened in 2004, she organized shows like “Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today,” which closed in May, and “Against the Grain: Contemporary Art From the Edward R. Broida Collection,” in 2006.

This spring and summer she rearranged several of the museum’s painting and sculpture collection galleries, including those devoted to Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism and Postminimalism, and organized one of the museum’s “Focus” series installations, a gallery of work by Joseph Beuys.

She has also been responsible for important acquisitions of works by artists like Beuys, Donald Judd, Robert Gober and Matthew Barney. She will coordinate the New York version of “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem Perspective,” a show organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles that arrives at MoMA in February. She is also at work on an exhibition of the Mexican artist Gabriel Orozco that is expected to open in December 2009.

Among her publications are works on Newman, Neel, Beuys and Mr. Pettibon.

“One of the big advantages is that we’ve had the benefit of seeing how scholarly Ann is,” said Leon D. Black, a longtime MoMA board member who is chairman of the trustee’s painting and sculpture committee.

The Modern’s next hiring challenge is finding a replacement for Alanna Heiss, founding director of its P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, who retires at the end of the year.

新闻联播：DIA新总监；纽约同志“自豪”游行

zhangxiaomin — Tue, 24 June 2008 16:09:41 -0400

Dia艺术基金会任命42岁的菲利培·佛恩（Philippe Vergne），这位之前在明尼阿波利斯的沃克尔艺术中心（Walker Art Center）工作了11年的策展人，担任总监。佛恩此前策划过多次引人瞩目的大型展览，包括1997年的中国艺术家黄永砯的巡回回顾展。详情见纽约时报。

本周日纽约市将举行一年一度的同志游行（也包括双性恋和变性人士，合称LGBT，但中文就不知所谓了），起点为第五大道和52街，终点为西村的克里斯托夫街，详情在此。