Author: Douglas McLennan

Grappling with making up a budget shortfall, the Vancouver Art Gallery worries about the affect its fight with its former director will have on fundraising. “There is concern the public dispute could prompt the gallery’s major funding agencies to hold back money, forcing cuts to programs and staff,” says the museum’s board president. – Vancouver Sun

Europe’s museums and monuments have become so clogged in recent years it’s difficult to get near them in tourist season. So Italy has announced that starting this summer it is extending hours hours of admission on Sundays to 11 pm. – MSNBC (Reuters)

London’s National Portrait Gallery now has a dramatic new extension – including a top-floor atrium with panoramic views of the city – designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, architects of the remodeled Royal Opera House. – The Guardian

— has won this year’s Pritzker Prize for architecture. – New York Times

• “The leader of a spectacularly irreverent generation of Dutch architects” – Washington Post
  
  
• “Designer and guru, engineer and visionary.” – Dallas Morning News
  
  
• A new Seattle library: “Koolhaas’ contribution will be a honeycombed, wire/mesh and glass building that will extend 12 stories high in a series of sliding platforms.” – Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  
  
• “Most revolutionary urban thinker.” – Los Angeles Times

The Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Museum team up on a commercial website for art. Plans include selling commissioned design products and offering educational programs such as live webcasts of lectures and concerts. It will also carry archival material on art. Profits from the site will help pay the museums’ operating expenses.  – New York Times

New Zealand’s big state-owned company ECNZ is going out of business. So what’s to become of the company’s publicly-owned  “highly discriminating corporate art collection” of some of the country’s best artists? By law, the collection has to be displayed for the public, but… – New Zealand Herald

A University of Toronto professor of psychology says that paying close attention to the blind may tell us a whole lot about art. “Over three decades of experiments, the Irish-born scientist has shown that the blind can make and understand pictures in ways that no one had imagined. And that fact forces us to rethink many of our preconceptions about representational art in general.” – The Globe and Mail (Canada)

This week the Guggenheim shows New York the Frank Gehry building it wants to build in Lower Manhattan. Will the project really get built? Hard to say, but “like other sideshows that have kept New York in denial about the mediocrity of the buildings it puts up, the feasibility question distracts from the challenge presented by the design. This is the top form architecture comes in these days. Want some?” – New York Times