Category: visual

“When the many-headed exhibition extravaganza ‘Pacific Standard Time’ opens in October 2011, some 40 Southern California museums and nonprofit galleries will offer shows focusing in one manner or another on the origins of the art scene here, from 1945 to 1980.” Now the Getty Trust, the project’s lead funder and organizer, is making the event even bigger.

An exhibition at DC’s National Building Museum features facsimiles, by “Lego master” Adam Reed Tucker, of such icons as the Empire State Building, Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, the Gateway Arch, Fallingwater, and Calatrava’s never-built Chicago Spire. “The Lego brick … [is] the perfect toy for the age in which it was introduced, which helps explain why Tucker’s models have a cultural power that ordinary architectural models might not.”

“The Palm Springs Art Museum has formed a committee to oversee fundraising and other activities related to a new satellite site that is expected to open in late 2011 or early 2012 in Palm Desert.”

“Forget about Arabia as a land without figural representation. It was already there in the fourth millennium B.C.” and continued ruight up to the advent of Islam, as a new exhibition at the Louvre shows.

“In a what-took-them-so-long bit of news, the California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art has added an architecture category for the first time.”

Henry Moore’s heaviest bronze sculpture, Large Divided Oval: Butterfly, has been restored in Berlin. Weighing nearly nine tons, it was his final major work, completed just before he died in 1986

Francis Lam: “Presumably, Andy Ellison’s artichoke didn’t feel the terror I did when he laid it down to a nice magnetic resonance bath, but the images he got of it – and 14 other fruits and vegetables so far in his project Inside Insides – are stunning.”

“Austria’s Leopold Museum paid $19 million to the heirs of the Jewish art dealer Lea Bondi Jaray to settle a decades-long dispute over Egon Schiele’s portrait of his lover Wally, stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s.”

MOCA’s design was one of five presented to the commission for the district, a $150-plus million development project in University Circle.

“This is not the time to forget the true value of our collections: a historical and aesthetic resource held in care for future generations. Let’s keep the doors open to the public but closed to the salesman. Losing these treasures is too high a price to pay for short-term financial gain.”