"Our hope is that we can help bring democracy and free access to what, for a long time, was an exclusive and closed art world".
A cocktail of disinterest and discord has left the Belgian capital with no contemporary art museum and a closed modern art museum — but wide open to artists, galleries and collectors who thrive on the city's balance of chaos and calm, energy and laid-back attitude.
Photograph: Marcel Antonisse/AFP Reuters inverviewed some early-morning commuters in Amsterdam as they prepared to vote, at a "still-closed art deco cafe by the railway platform": Nienke van Zaambeek, a psychologist, had voted for GreenLeft, saying she was worried about the impact of liberalisation in the health care sector.
He arranges a closed-bid art auction to serve a subpoena on a resistant witness, rigs a photo trick to break down solid eyewitness testimony and takes a mannequin into court to illustrate a dubious defense point.
Through the work of her now-closed art foundation in Toronto, Ydessa Hendeles has acquired a rep as a master showman, pioneering curation as a form of high theatre.
Lincoln Center has made much of how its reconstruction will create a new social openness, and the official line is that the center — not just Tully Hall — has been a "closed citadel" of the arts, set apart from the life of New York City's streets.
This summer, he hopes to start work on a film called Paint, another of his forensic examinations of a closed culture - the New York art world - but it's not certain yet.
Lukács' commitment to a conception of the work of art as a closed totality, structured by the strict laws of its medium and objectively reflecting the development of humanity in the mode of mimetic evocation, has considerable implications for his own judgments as an aesthetic theorist.
Noting the manifest difference in style between the realist Ion Luca and his two sons, Vianu pointed out that the three shared, as characteristic traits, "The cultivation of developed forms, the view of art as a closed system resistant to the anarchic forces of reality".
