“It is a sad, feeble, ineffectual excuse for a public sculpture. All this talk about it existing in its full reality only on TV or the internet or wherever is nonsense. This is a physical work of art that involves people standing on a plinth. And the truth that some of us can’t help noticing, however much we are lectured otherwise, is that they look stupid up there.”
Category: visual
Calatrava’s ‘Glorious’ New Station in Belgium: ‘The Future Of Train Travel’
“[T]he new station at Liège-Guillemins is a revelation, … easily one of the world’s finest. Its ethereal, transparent, filigree architecture suggests openness, a dissolving of boundaries, infinite horizons, speed, grace and ease: everything, in other words, that train travel should be.”
Meanwhile, Tate Plans London’s First Major Gauguin Show In 50 Years
“‘Gaugin: Maker of Myth’ will bring together more than 100 works from public and private collections worldwide and trace how he pioneered modernism with his radical, bold images.” Also on tap is a major Henry Moore retrospective.
At The Hermitage, Crisis Is Opportunity
“Director Mikhail Piotrovsky says the museum’s biggest projects were born in times of crisis – which explains why he is now supervising an expansion, a reinstallation, and several new international venues.”
Georgia O’Keeffe In The Abstract
“There are two Georgia O’Keeffes. They’re closely related, but one is far more interesting than the other. Not so interesting, except maybe as a marketing phenomenon, is the post-1930s cow-skull painter and striker of frontier-priestess poses. More interesting, and less familiar, is the artist found in [the new Whitney show] ‘Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction’.”
Former Museum Director Charged With Theft Of Artifacts
“The ousted director of Long Island University’s Hillwood Museum stole Egyptian artifacts from the collection and peddled the precious antiquities through Christie’s auction house, the feds charged yesterday.” Barry “Stern is accused of stealing nine artifacts — all more than 2,000 years old — and delivering them to Christie’s in the month after his employment contract was terminated….”
Long Beach Slashes $400,000 From Art Museum’s Funding
The city budget “gives the [Long Beach Museum of Art] $169,000, down from $569,000 the previous year.” In part, the cut “was spurred by officials’ ire at having to pay off a $3.06-million bond that museum leaders had promised years ago to cover but then failed to when their fund-raising campaign fizzled.”
Recovery Watch: Damien Hirst Values Have Bounced Back
“Auction estimates — if not realized prices” for Hirst’s work “– are similar to those seen at Sotheby’s event last September, which raised the most money for a single-artist auction. … An increase in estimates shows some confidence returning to the market after contemporary-art prices dropped as much as 30 to 50 percent this year, said dealers.”
Thanks To Real Estate Slump, New York Gets An Art Park
On Friday, “a new 37,000-square-foot outdoor exhibition and performance space will open in Lower Manhattan. … Appropriately – given that the lot is on loan for about three years from developers who had hoped to build there by now – the project will be called LentSpace.”
An International Battle Over Batik
“After a run of what Indonesian nationalists view as Malaysia’s poaching of its culture, the announcement last week that [UNESCO] would add batik” – Indonesian batik, mind you – “to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list … was especially welcome.” But “Malaysians, for their part, appear mostly perplexed by the Indonesian batik campaign.”