Category: visual

“The recession is forcing some Canadian art museums and galleries to cancel, reschedule, rejig or indefinitely postpone exhibitions – both new ones and those on tour from elsewhere…. And even where it isn’t a direct contributing factor, the sputtering economy is, in the words of one director, ‘making us rethink how we go about partnering, organizing and what we bring in.’ One silver lining: The impact has been less harsh here than in the United States.”

The owners of the Prairie Avenue Bookshop, Chicago’s great architectural bookstore, “have discussed a sale with book dealers and even the Chicago Architecture Foundation,” hoping the store won’t have to close Sept. 1 after all. “But nothing has jelled. Which raises a broader question: Can architectural book stores succeed in this digital age?”

“With prices in flux, many collectors prefer the discretion and flexibility of a private sale over the auction room’s risk and visibility. ‘If it doesn’t sell, it’s not a public event,’ said Michael Findlay, director at Acquavella Galleries Inc. in New York. ‘However, if your painting is on the cover of an auction catalog and it’s been marketed globally and then doesn’t sell — ouch!'”

“[At the] lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, that movie-set-perfect Art Deco interior, … for the last nine months a team of six conservators has all but moved in and will be there for the next two years. Carefully concealed behind giant scrims, they spend hour after hour methodically removing decades of yellowed varnish from the building’s famed murals, one inch at a time.”

The planning committee of the Borough of Camden’s governing council has rejected, by a five-to-four vote, the Rogers Stirk Harbour & Partners scheme for a £130 million, five-story modernist glass extension to the British Museum. “The rejection came despite the plans enjoying the support of English Heritage and being recommended for approval by Camden’s own planning officers.”

“Once celebrated as Europe’s leading art and design school, by early 1933 the Bauhaus was reduced to camping in a hastily converted telephone factory on the outskirts of Berlin and subsisting on handouts from its director, the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Denouncing it as ‘un-German,’ the newly elected Nazi government forced the school to close.” Now a major exhibition on the school has opened – next door to the old Gestapo headquarters.

The UK’s position as a worldwide leader in conservation received another serious blow as London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) and the Royal College of Art have confirmed plans to close their joint post-graduate conservation training programme.

“Outdoor art isn’t what it used to be. Once it honored heroic individuals and upheld values that whole populations could embrace.” (Think of the Statue of Liberty, or the Grand Army Plazas in Manhattan and Brooklyn.) “Today, excepting memorials like the Vietnam veterans wall, outdoor art serves rather to divert, amuse and comfort. … The big problem for outdoor art is the absence of any consensus of values in our pluralistic, multicultural society. It’s hard to imagine a public sculpture of a hero today that would not be regarded by one faction or another as partisan.”

“One of Canadian art’s major auction partnerships has been scrapped after Toronto-based Ritchies admitted it missed a payment deadline for a number of clients who had consigned paintings for a multimillion-dollar joint Sotheby’s-Ritchies sale in May.” The president of Sotheby’s Canada called the payment failure a “cardinal sin” and said “that Sotheby’s moved quickly to end its seven-year association with Ritchies.”

“[T]he tent fabric is finally going into place over the aluminum skeleton of Zaha Hadid’s much-delayed Burnham Plan Centennial pavilion in Millennium Park,” but “the pavilion, which was supposed to be done five weeks ago, is likely to open a few days after its Aug. 1 target.”