Category: visual

“As the contemporary art market rebounds from the recession, Mr. Gagosian’s art empire is exploding. In the last few years, he has opened new galleries in London, Paris, Rome, Geneva, Athens and Hong Kong, expanding his global art network to 11 galleries world-wide–the largest blue-chip franchise ever attempted in the industry.”

Think back to the time “before faxes, cell phones, color Xeroxes, personal computers, and Power Point. The cumbersome and slow production of drawings and reports required extensive preparation – hurried changes were difficult if not impossible. Such working methods required … ‘tremendous discipline and rigor of thought’.”

“Yesterday saw the launch of the first Bauhaus magazine production since 1931. Although the Bauhaus influence was not silenced in the intervening 80 years, the launch, at a crowded bookshop in former East Berlin, is nevertheless an exciting moment in the tumultuous relationship between science and the arts.”

“The Pritzker Prize promotes the fiction that buildings spring from the imagination of an individual architect–the master builder. This wasn’t true in the Middle Ages, when there were real master builders, and it isn’t true today.”

“Over the centuries, a steady stream of devices altered the way that architects worked: pencils, erasers (what a boon they were!), T-squares, tracing paper, parallel rules, technical pens, rub-on lettering. No device has had the impact of the computer, however.”

Only two Southern California institutions, the Getty Center and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, made the top-100 list in the Art Newspaper’s international survey of museum attendance. With 1,205,685 visitors last year, the Getty came in 33rd, behind not just the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York with more than 5 million but also San Francisco’s De Young Museum with 2 million and the Art Institute of Chicago at 1.6 million.

“The survey of 2010 exhibitions is more international than ever, featuring for the first time figures from several Brazilian and Korean venues. Japanese museums retain the top spots in the exhibition survey.”

“An Italian government official on Monday offered to end a long legal fight with the J. Paul Getty Museum by proposing shared custody of a 2,300-year-old bronze statue known as ‘Victorious Youth.’ … Getty officials said the object wasn’t up for discussion because of the legal process.”

“The Getty Museum is the first museum in North America to agree to return a painting to the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a noted Dutch-Jewish art dealer whose huge collection was dispersed after he fled the 1940 Nazi invasion of Holland, with many of the prime works taken for the personal collection of Adolf Hitler’s chief deputy, Hermann Goering.”

The fanciful, undulating structure, designed by Jürgen Mayer H and made of timber and structural steel, is intended to provide shade and public amenities for a plaza in the old city that had been used largely as a parking lot.