Category: visual

“Following public pressure from the City Council, the Chicago Park District late this afternoon agreed to cut entry fees to the Art Institute of Chicago that were scheduled to take effect May 23. Instead of paying $18, adult art admirers will have to pay $16 – a $2 decrease, according to a park district spokeswoman.”

“Celebrated Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava’s dramatic, $300 million vision for Symphony Center will not survive a proposed change of location to the Woodruff [Arts Center] campus.” A Woodruff officer said, “to assume you could pick up that design and move it to a different site doesn’t make sense.”

“The image is of St. Anthony being tormented by eight flying demons. The painting is on a wooden panel, 18 inches tall. And some scholars are now convinced that Michelangelo Buonarotti completed it in 1487-88 — when he was 12 or 13 years old. … It’s rare because it’s only one of four easel paintings the artist made, and now the only one in an American museum.”

In the revamped process, “architects compete on the quality of their portfolios and their construction records. Building projects are grouped by cost, from high to low, encouraging smaller and younger firms to apply at the lower end; eligible architects are selected by a panel that reviews and updates the list periodically. Realistic fees are negotiated…. This makes the process more open, more rational, and more fiscally controllable. It also delivers infinitely better buildings.”

“Actor Owen Wilson, billionaire Eli Broad and former Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz watched the art market take another knock last night as Sotheby’s posted its smallest New York contemporary auction since May 2003. The $47 million tally was down 87 percent, or $315 million, from Sotheby’s record a year ago….”

“‘Abolish the monarchy!’ a tiny voice piped up at the end of the Prince of Wales’s lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London last night. It was a distinctly solitary protest against Prince Charles’s first big speech on architecture for 20 years.” The prince — who even said “sorry” — was in fence-mending mode, “keen to stress that he was more concerned with ‘original, in the true sense’ and ‘organic’ architecture than with recreating past styles.”

“Something much more subtle than a classic boom-bust cycle is going on. The art world is punishing the overly prolific, those artists who responded (in retrospect, perhaps too hastily) to stiff demand by upping supply.” And with demand going soft, auction houses and galleries are tending to avoid younger artists in favor of the tried-and-true.

“‘Nefertiti’ does not look much like any other ancient Egyptian sculpture. On the other hand, it does have an early 1900s feel: somewhere between Art Nouveau and Art Deco, just right for the moment it was first seen publicly, in 1924. … Do such worries matter? After all, scientific tests support the authenticity of Nefertiti….”

“The tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. … Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France’s greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the ‘odious column of bolted metal.'”

Blair Kamin: “[T]he just-completed spire atop the 92-story Trump International Hotel & Tower, the tallest American skyscraper since the 1974 completion of Sears Tower … [is] a one-star piece of skyline stagecraft, a Kmart accessory for an Hermès suit.”